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| Writer/director Ivan Sen |
LIMBO B Australia (108 mi) 2023 ‘Scope d: Ivan Sen
Sometimes you can just never find the truth. You’ve got to find another way to make peace. —Charlie (Rob Collins)
Not to be confused with the John Sayles film Limbo (1999), Ivan Sen’s MYSTERY ROAD (2013) and Goldstone (2016), both featuring an Aboriginal police detective, were extremely popular with the Australian public, where the lead protagonist held immense appeal, leading to a spin-off television series, while this takes us into that same barren wasteland, but from the perspective of a much more flawed white homicide police detective who stirs things up in the middle of nowhere by searching for sufficient clues to determine if there’s enough evidence to re-open a 20-year old unsolved murder of a local Aboriginal girl whose body was never found, a case left unsolved by a disinterested and incompetent police investigation. A bleak and layered drama filled with long pauses and endless silences, where you can hear the sound of gravel underneath the wheels of a car, time simply moves more slowly out there, as we find ourselves in one of the most desolate places on the planet, like living in oblivion, where the land is as abused as the characters living there, discovering that people remain damaged and disconnected both from themselves and each other, and most especially from their families, as things that don’t make sense tend to happen all the time, causing confusion and bewilderment, where justice or trust are simply not part of the local vocabulary. Another director who writes, directs, produces, shoots, edits, and scores his own films, Sen flips the script with this strangely detached “outback-noir” tale, shot in just 16 days in the Coober Pedy region of South Australia, known as the opal capital of the world, where the world-weary residents are beaten down by the dire and exhausting circumstances, expecting and saying very little, as they’re literally in limbo, featuring stunning aerial viewpoints and stark black and white photography that accentuates a treeless, moon-like terrain where nothing grows in the scorching daytime heat of this barren landscape, filled with the cratered remnants of extensive opal mining and underground dwellings to escape the heat. Sen’s earlier features highlighted the constant police harassment of Indigenous people (referred to in the film as blacks), offering the perspective of the justice system through the eyes of an Indigenous police officer, but here he turns an unflinching eye on the effects of that harassment, expressed through a pervasive aversion toward the police, who are viewed suspiciously. This is a world where black girls and women are routinely targeted by predatory white men, but the police turn a blind eye, refusing to invest resources, ask questions, or take a young Indigenous girl’s disappearance seriously, as if it hardly matters, incidents that are all too common with Indigenous family histories, shifting the blame from the real perpetrators to instead targeting local black men and boys with endless threats of violence. This film explores the deeper impact of a crime on one Indigenous family through the eyes of a white policeman, taking place in a ghost town where there’s no conceivable local authority, examining the damage caused by a failed justice system and the resilience of those who continue to endure its consequences, discovering lost souls crushed under the weight of longstanding racist indifference.
At the center of the picture is Simon Baker, who surprisingly made an early appearance decades ago in Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), but more recently starred in the TV series The Mentalist (2008-2015), taking his earnings to support the Australian film industry, specifically working with Indigenous filmmakers, seen here playing Travis Hurley, a white policeman who is sent to this lone outpost to determine if there’s enough evidence to reopen the case of a young Indigenous girl, Charlotte, who disappeared twenty years ago without a trace, where the negligence of the police investigation has corroded the community and torn the family apart. But Travis is no ordinary cop, as we see him preparing and shooting narcotics into his arm at the local hotel, whose underground rooms are built into the old tunnels of a mine, where the cave-like walls resemble a tomb, as the people that live here are calloused by the harshness of the landscape and the merciless disregard for their lives by the authorities, leaving each one of them isolated and alone, cut off from the outside world and each other, living in a no man’s land where all hope has been abandoned, recalling the message outside the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Travis starts with the family, who are eviscerated by loss and grief, beginning with Charlie (Rob Collins), the girl’s brother, an opal miner who lives alone in a trailer, exiled away from his family, where he is wracked by guilt, loneliness, and regret. Emma (Natasha Wanganeen from Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE in 2002) is the surviving sister working as a waitress in a local café, raising two girls and a boy, one of her own and two of Charlie’s estranged kids, living in what feels like worlds apart. The reclusive and suspicious Joseph (Nicholas Hope) is supposedly the aging brother of a white prospector named Leon, named as a suspect in the original investigation, who’s alleged to be dead, having suffered from dementia, where some form of forgetting seems to have afflicted the entire nation, yet Joseph barely ever sees anyone and stays alone living in his mine with his dog, with literally nowhere else to go. It’s clear from the start that the case was never properly investigated, as at the time the girl was initially reported missing, it took weeks before the police even investigated, shifting away from the known white suspects to threatening the local Indigenous population, shoddily covering it up by framing her brother Charlie, an easy target who became something of a racist smokescreen, yet typical of the way these investigations have gotten sidetracked by economic and social privileges for the past hundred years, incidents that routinely tear families apart, leaving behind a lingering stench of racist disdain. In many ways this mirrors the fiasco surrounding the Bowraville murders, unsolved serial killings of three Aboriginal children in the early 1990’s, where the white murder suspect has continually eluded criminal prosecution. This devastatingly tender film, mostly comprised of small, casual moments, symbolizes the history of atrocities committed by white colonial settlers against Aboriginal peoples over centuries, reflective of the White Australia policy and the collective amnesia of the nation, leading to decades of exploitation and community neglect just in the last century, emblematic of how difficult it is to survive in this forbidding landscape and for traumatic wounds to heal.
Delving into the godforsaken territory explored in Jane Campion’s television mini-series 2013 Top Ten List #9 Top of the Lake, this is not a white savior movie, offering no redemptive salvation and no quick fix, as a disillusioned Travis is a bit jaded himself, with his own troubled past, coming from a broken marriage, leaving him something of a shell of a man, hardly the answer to anyone’s prayers, listening to evangelical religious messages on the car radio as he arrives into this outback mining town, literally searching for his own personal salvation, which is intertwined in his quest for meaning, informing children “I came out of the sky” when asked where he comes from. Moving from person to person, becoming a stoic intermediary whose greatest strength lies in his ability to listen, even if only fragments and hints are offered to him, he slowly makes inroads as people who initially clammed up on him for fear of reprisals become more outspoken, offering relevant bits and pieces of insight as he begins to piece together what happened. Leon, the prime suspect, was known for hosting drinking parties that lured teenage black girls into his cave, where these women had a habit of feeling drugged and sedated when they woke up the next morning, like having their memories erased. At the outset, Joseph indicates his brother died in the past year, yet no one else remembers Leon ever had a brother, leaving unanswered questions that oppressively linger in the air, with suggestions that not everyone is telling the truth. Charlie had been falsely accused of Charlotte’s murder in the early days of the investigation, after the corrupt police tortured two other men into lying, saying they had witnessed the crime. After an exasperated mental breakdown, Charlie questioned his own fitness to adequately parent, so his two kids began living with his sister Emma. And that is simply par for the course in this part of the world, exposing the marginalization faced by Indigenous communities, with no reliance on outside help, faced with systemic racism and the lingering effects of colonialism, where revisiting generational trauma by failed attempts to respectfully redress injustice highlights the complexities of loss experienced by Aboriginal Australians. This is no ordinary police thriller, reduced to a series of conversations, though part of its unique effect is the way it subverts our own expectations, slowly unraveling, yet never arriving at any sense of resolution, with Travis ultimately becoming a kind of catalyst and healer within this fractured family, yet we’re left adrift, cut off from any form of justice, much like this Aboriginal culture, an otherworldly living culture that has never been truly embraced by the larger Australian community, remaining at odds, like its own force of nature, which can be felt but not seen or truly understood, in much the same way nature is presented in the Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Notable for its ambiguity, and its moody mix of bare-bones plot and eccentric characters, Aboriginal culture is a metaphysical presence that remains an enigma that mainstream white Australia fails to grasp, forever haunting us with its own intrinsic mysteries, where it’s rare to find a film that explores the depths of psychological damage with this degree of complexity.
