What Birthright gets right about my parents' house

I watched the trailer for Birthright on a Saturday morning in Marrickville, halfway through my second long black, and the bit that landed was small. Cory, in his thirties, takes a phone call from his Boomer father. The father offers to pay rent. Not a deposit, not the whole bloody house, just rent. A patch on the leaking roof. Cory’s face does the thing your face does when someone misreads a problem so badly that correcting them feels like a third job.

That’s the film, more or less, in 94 minutes. Birthright, out in Australian cinemas nationally on May 21, is Western Australian theatre director Zoe Pepper’s first feature, and the conceit is straightforward enough that you can read it on the poster. Millennial couple Cory and Jasmine, broke and pregnant, move into Cory’s parents’ house in the Perth Hills. Things go sideways in the way black comedies require them to.

I should declare an angle. I’m a Millennial with Boomer parents who own a paid-off house in inner-west Sydney, and the housing argument is the one I keep losing at our family dinners. I have a stake in whether this film is funny, and a stake in whether it’s right. It is, and it is, and that’s a sentence I wasn’t sure I’d be writing.

The argument the film is having

Pepper has been explaining the origin story to anyone who’ll listen this week. The idea, she told The Sydney Morning Herald, came from watching her friends pack up rentals during the pandemic and move back into their parents’ spare rooms. Her thesis is sharper than the setup. Millennials, she said, are getting shafted from many different angles in a way that their Boomer parents do not understand.

I want to be careful here, because the generational frame can slide into a tantrum pretty quickly. Pepper mostly avoids that because she has an actual chart. Her tonal lodestar was Australian banker Satyajit Das, who riffed on Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son to argue that Boomers are holding on to wealth with such an iron grip that it’s crippling the economy. That’s a lot to hang on a black comedy. The film carries it anyway.

The e61 Institute has the figure you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. The post-tax income of over-60s in Australia is now 95 per cent of 18-to-60 year olds. Thirty years ago, it was 61 per cent. The young don’t outearn the old. They don’t even come close.

The thing that surprises me about Birthright, watching it cold, is that the leads don’t seem to be acting from a research file. They’re acting from a credit-check. Travis Jeffrey, who plays Cory, lost an off-the-plan home purchase before shooting wrapped. He got the deposit back. He hasn’t been able to buy a house since.

Maria Angelico, who plays Jasmine, has been outbid by an investor and has no family deposit support. She did the maths on a Melbourne property she liked. Thirty years ago it sold for eighty grand. Now it’s way over a million. Angelico called the number unfathomable, which I think she meant in the way I mean it, which is: I have done the sum and I cannot live with the result.

Angelico is also good on the wider drag of the crisis, which doesn’t show up in median-price line graphs. The crisis has a ripple effect, she said. It affects lifestyle, lowering birth rates, pushing people into multiple jobs. Especially for artists. You need time and space to write your book. If you’re working two other jobs, you don’t.

The line in the film I keep coming back to is one Pepper gave to Variety. Cory’s flaw, she said, is that he isn’t exceptional. In generations gone by, it was alright to not be exceptional. You could still live a good life and have all the middle-class trappings. For Cory, and for the generation he stands in for, being unexceptional doesn’t cut it.

I might be wrong about this, but I think it’s the bit critics will underrate. It’s the inversion of what every Boomer parent I know thinks the rules still are. Show up. Work hard. Be reasonably competent. The trimmings of a middle-class life will follow. Pepper’s claim, which the data backs, is that the deal has been rewritten in invisible ink.

The week of the film, the week of the budget

Birthright arrives in cinemas nine days after Treasurer Jim Chalmers hands down a budget that, if the leaks are right, will reshape the capital gains tax concession and trim negative gearing for the sake of what Chalmers keeps calling intergenerational equity. I’ve been writing about that package for the past week. I’m less convinced than the Treasurer that it’ll cool prices fast on its own. It will help at the margin. The film’s argument is that the margin is not where the pain lives.

The Perth angle is worth dwelling on because the film is set there and Pepper has lived through it. Perth, she told Perth Is OK, has had a particularly savage dose of the housing crisis since the pandemic. The audiences laugh harder, she said, in the cities where it hurts more. West Australians get the first-home stamp duty lift in their state budget. It’s a hundred-grand break against a nine-hundred-grand median. You can do that maths in your head and feel a small migraine forming.

Here’s where I think the film, and the press around it, gets a little neat. The argument that Boomers have all the wealth and Millennials have none assumes both groups are roughly homogenous. They aren’t. There are working-class Boomer parents who never bought. There are Millennials sitting on inherited equity already. Independent Australia made the point more bluntly this week. Class is the missing link.

Pepper, to her credit, has actually written for it. The Jasmine character, by Pepper’s own framing, is the one who keeps exposing how oblivious the middle-class circles around her are. The film knows. The discourse around the film sometimes doesn’t. I’d treat Birthright as a class story dressed in a generation costume, which is probably the more honest version anyway.

There are real fixes hiding in plain sight that don’t require waiting for someone’s parents to die. Housing co-operatives are one. They aren’t romantic and they don’t make a black comedy, but they’re the kind of structural answer the film, by design, can’t offer.

What I’m still working out

I left the trailer thinking two things, and they argue with each other. The first is that Pepper is right, the deal has changed, and the people who can’t see it are the ones benefitting from it. The second is that putting Cory at the centre, a privately-cracked-up middle-class lad who expects help, is a slightly soft target. The film knows this. It answers with Jasmine. I’m not sure the audience does.

There’s a stunt attached to the release that I’d ordinarily roll my eyes at. Coposit, the ten-grand-deposit app, is giving away ten thousand dollars to one cinemagoer who films their reaction to the movie. In the film, Cory’s father gives him exactly ten thousand dollars. The mirroring is clever and a bit grim, which is, on reflection, how I’d describe Birthright itself.

Cinemas, May 21. Q&A screenings start in Melbourne this week and run through Perth on May 19. Bring your parents.