“People meet me and they go, you’re real! They can’t believe it,” says Sandra Pankhurst, the subject of Lachlan Mcleod’s second documentary, Clean.
Pankhurst is a person who has led many lives within a life: adopted as a child, then severely abused by her adoptive parents; emerging from a failed marriage and coming out as a transgender woman in the 1980s; working as a drag queen and sex worker; and eventually starting her own cleaning business in the 1990s. Late in her life (she died in 2021), Pankhurst became a public figure after the publication of Sarah Krasnostein’s expansive, heartfelt and award-winning book about her life and line of work, The Trauma Cleaner, in 2017.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve read Krasnostein’s book; Mcleod is adept at letting the story unfold without unnecessary intervention. How did Pankhurst get to where she is? Why did she embark on such a unique vocation? What was her life like after The Trauma Cleaner was published? If you have read it, then Clean, while having no association with Krasnostein’s book, acts as a sequel of sorts: in it we see Pankhurst in the aftermath and right up until her death.
Pankhurst’s cleaning company is no ordinary business. Based in Frankston, Victoria, Pankhurst and her team specialise in “trauma cleaning”: swabbing-down crime scenes and suicide sites, assisting the mentally and physically disabled with home maintenance, and clearing out hoarders’ homes and deceased estates. Pankhurst, the founder and director of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services, is no longer cleaning herself when Mcleod starts filming, as she struggles from major respiratory illnesses from inhaling toxic chemicals without adequate protection in her early years on the job.
Although Clean largely revolves around Pankhurst, interviews with her staff and various clients make the film that much more rhizomic. The film is the opposite of what John Berger criticised in Ways of Seeing: “Art that makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling”. Instead, Clean is a tapestry that helps bring a character’s story to the public eye in a way that is as unsensational as it is intuitive. Here, Mcleod is both interlocutor and witness. When hoarders, the disabled and previously incarcerated people are often subject to an outsider’s gaze – and as the middle classes aspire towards minimalism and Marie Kondo-style “decluttering” - Clean shows that, as Pankhurst says early on, “Everyone’s got trauma; it’s not the demographic, it’s the circumstance.”
Shot plainly and at a remove, there is no fanfare in Clean – just the story and the people telling it, many of whom are candid and irreverent; a lifetime of hardship and trauma does not allow for self-consciousness. We follow Pankhurst’s staff – on their way to work, at home or on the job – and it’s clear they share her ethos of “promoting care, compassion and dignity” with their clients. Their work can be hard, they admit – one cleaner likens the work of sorting through debris for used syringes to a game of pick-up sticks – but it can also be worthwhile.
However, Mcleod’s major misstep is adding unnecessary reenactments of events from Pankhurst’s past. Between interviews, there are scenes shot in a muted colour palette – of a lone boy sitting at a desk, blood dripping in reconstructed crime scenes, sex workers performing their jobs and smoking cigarettes. Paired with the overworked original score by Patrick Grigg, these scenes feel bathetic; Pankhurst is a natural storyteller, and her no-bullshit presence tells us enough.
That being said, there is a certain vulnerability in Pankhurst that comes through in Clean. She tries to remain stoic, even through bouts of laboured breathing, and abruptly changes the subject when she is asked a question that catches her unawares. Before going on stage to speak at a conference, she casually tells someone that a tumour has been discovered in her brain. Much like the elaborate makeup she puts on every day, Mcleod shows us that Pankhurst’s mask is well-worn, constructed through decades of trauma and her stubborn determination to leave it all behind.
Clean is screening as part of the 2022 Melbourne international film festival. It will be released in Australian cinemas on 15 September
