The Triangle Wars

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 6, 2011.

People power seems to be flavour of the month for Melbourne documentary makers. Persecution Blues: The Battle for the Tote chronicled the fight to save a beloved Collingwood music venue; Rosie Jones' The Triangle Wars introduces us to a more genteel protest group on the other side of the Yarra, who pit themselves against the plan to build a mega-sized bayside shopping complex – complete with multiple nightclubs, cinemas, and carparks – next to the Palais Theatre in St Kilda, as if to erase the last traces of the suburb's mythically seedy allure.

Combining talking-head interviews with fly-on-the-wall footage, The Triangle Wars thrives on distinctive ''characters'' willing to ham it up on camera. Though there are no pure villains, it's evident where Jones' sympathies lie; the property developer Steve McMillan comes across as a good-natured cowboy – in a dramatised version, he might be played by Steve Bisley – while photographer-turned-activist Serge Thomann is a romantic with dreams of glory that hark back to the French Resistance. Caught in the middle is Dick Gross, a councillor who backs the proposal: a vulnerable man-of-the-people with a tendency to shoot his mouth off and appalling taste in shirts. As the anti-development sentiment builds, media figures including Rachel Griffiths and Dave Hughes add their voices to the campaign, while bohemian grande dame Mirka Mora, resident in St Kilda since the 1960s, is predictably ready to flash the camera and soak up her share of the spotlight.

For those with no immediate stake in the outcome, it's a mildly farcical story with some strange detours (local readers may recall the bizarre saga of Caroline Shahbaz, the ''white witch'' of Port Phillip). But by and large Jones and her team manage to cut a clear path through a tangle of legal and political issues, aided by the chromatic textures of Dale Cornelius' mock-suspenseful score. There's a victory of sorts for one side, but the future of the site remains uncertain; in the words of the Paul Kelly song in the credits, ''everything goes on just the same''.