Mark O'Toole

Night Fare opens on a Melbourne cab as it cruises the late night city streets. The Music playing under tells us that the driver is most likely from the Indian subcontinent, and when he finally pulls over and exits the cab this is proven to the case. From the film’s title we are led to expect that the film will be about one of the driver’s fares, or passengers. Attitudes to and Indian and Pakistani cab drivers have been making the news for the last couple of years, and very rarely in a positive way.
On one side is the attitude that the drivers don’t know the streets, on the other that Australians have an ingrained racial intolerance for cab drivers from non-European backgrounds. It would seem to follow then that the film would focus on one such ‘night fare’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The ‘fare’ in question actually a meal. Once out of his cab the driver enters an Indian restaurant, which appears to be full of taxi drivers.

What follows is a sequence of shots showing food being prepared, men talking, food being served, men eating, lots of faces, lots of close ups of mouths and eyes and food, all played out against a vibrant Indian soundtrack.

Rather than try to tell a story in a traditional narrative sense the film gets its message across in a series of images. The message: that these people are no different from the rest of us. The simple act of watching these cab drivers, eat, drink and converse, humanises them, takes them out of the cabs and makes them real people, just like the rest of us.

Night Fare is an interesting, thought-provoking piece, not so much an entertainment as a subtle reminder that people who may at times seem no more than mere functionaries, are at the end of the day just as human as everybody else.
Would I want to see it padded out? Not particularly. It works as is, as a moment in time, captured on film, seemingly subtle, but at its core quite powerful.

Mark O’Toole
TV writer, ABC’s “Spicks & Specks”

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