Adrian Martin's article on Australian cinema - written for French readers -
is worth reading now that the AFI awards have been made.
Martin points out that Oz film has still not caught up with contempory
politics - dominated by the depressing state of contempory post September
11, post Bali fortess-Australia's heartlessness to asylum seekers. While it
has been busy churning out ersatz US genre, and standard local stock
quirky - with an occasional dash of middlebrow arthouse - it has, at least,
recently managed to take up the themes of the unreconciled Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal nations - although this theme would certainly be suitable for
the last category.
Of the films on these themes - Phil Noyce's, Rabbit Proof Fence, Rolf de
Heer's The Tracker, Ivan Sen's Beneath Clouds, and Paul Goldman's Australian
Rules - the first three seem to take most of the AFI awards. I dont think
Australian Rules did.
Sociologically -although not cinematically - it is perhaps the most
interesting. Not made by an Aboriginal director, it managed to cause grief
to many Aboriginal people, because it referred somewhat clumsily to the
death of a boy. Its reception got clouded in the debate over cultural
sensitivity, which was a pity for what is actually a modestly successful
work.
Rabbit-proof Fence was the judge and box-office favourite, but my least
favourite. The cinematography, by Christopher Doyle - Wong Kar-Wai's
collaborator - puts this film too much into the obsessive Australian
tradition of landscape-as-character film. But it seems to be the standard
sublime rather than a more intimate view of the country that the two stolen
girls travel through in order to return home. The plot is true, epic, but
predictable and thin. Perhaps it belongs to the middlebrow arthouse
category.
Beneath Clouds is a much better road story. Martin, I think, is a bit too
critical of this film. He rightly acknowledges its nice look, and criticises
its thinnish, ideologically riskless plot. The look recalls Badlands to
Martin, and Badlands is a wonder against which no film should have to bear
comparison. Martin sees Ivan Sen, the director, as seeming to be a bit
caught by the problem of being an Aboriginal director having to making
certain kinds of films. But as well as the cinematic style, it is a nice
story about an awkward friendship, with good dialogue.
The Tracker is a very well told tale, about the differences between white
and Aboriginal law. As the plot unfolds it gets better and better. It begins
with characters painted as archetypes. The characters develop filling out
and spilling beyond their archetypal, melodramatic shoes. The story becomes
more intriguing, sympathies and intentions are revealed in a nice rythmn,
(in the other films the characters are often too steretyped by the
lacklustre plotting). The country the party travels through is depicted with
an intimacy that RPF lacks - because of the Tracker's (played so well by
David Gulpilil) experienced perception (even though it is not actually his
traditional country). The incomprehensions of intercultural exchanges are
deeply woven into the plot. At the dramatic and violent moments of the plot,
stark paintings appear as punctuation, and the story is accompanied by song
(What I would call good melodramatic/epic touches). The film ends
impressively, felicitously - which none of the others do. There are many
pleasures in what is probably de Heer's best film. Better than the Quiet
Room and Dance Me To My Song. And much much better than the
kaspar-hauseresque Bad Boy Bubby.
Ross
|