Limbo (2023)

 

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.    

Sweet Country

Director Warwick Thornton

SWEET COUNTRY              B+                  

Australia  (113 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Warwick Thornton

Special Jury Prize winner at Venice where it premiered, Aboriginal writer/director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton of 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah takes us into the Australian Outback at a time when whites were grabbing up all the Aboriginal lands.  Revealing some of the ugly truths about the nation’s colonial past, the film is told from an Indigenous perspective, where according to the director, “A lot of our history was written by colonizers who wanted to write these stories about themselves to put themselves in a favorable light.  A lot of it is a lie.  Now we're starting to write down our history with our version of events.”  Set in central Australia in 1929 (though it feels timeless and could easily have been 100 years earlier), the film is shot near Alice Springs and the MacDonnell Ranges, the birthplace of the director, where the vast and spectacular lands are an outstanding example of an ancient landscape untouched by man, barren and empty, with picturesque gorges sculptured by the elements over time.  In something of an assault to the senses exposing a more primitive, raw edge even before the film begins, viewers hear a jarring sound design filled with racial insults and threats that remain off-camera, yet this unorthodox technique prepares viewers for what follows.  In a film where no one person is essentially a lead character, where all contribute to the whole, the only certainty is the hardship of the land, where Sam Neill plays Fred, a preacher who works as a local farmer, who believes all are equal under the eyes of God, and has an Indigenous couple working for him, Sam (Hamilton Morris) and Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber), treated fairly, sharing meals and dinner prayers together.  Their lives are interrupted by the presence of a neighbor, Harry March (Ewen Leslie), an ex-soldier still haunted by visions of the war (WWI), deftly shown through flashback sequences, drinking himself into a stupor every night trying to forget, yet he asks for help digging fence posts on his land, borrowing Sam and Lizzie for a couple days while Fred goes on a temporary excursion out of town.  Closer details, however, show a merciless treatment by the new settlers towards blacks, dispossessed, thrown off their land, living in slave-like conditions where they are treated as property for the exclusive use of whites, overworked, usually working for free, treated like livestock, and forced to sleep with the horses.      

Shot in just 22 days, the film has an expansive feel about it, covering a lot of ground, using an expressionist style of photography along with a naturalistic sound design that allows viewers to feel they are right there, given a front row seat, watching history unfold.  Interjected into the story is a somewhat rebellious half-breed Aboriginal youth, Philomac (played by twin brothers, Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), who seems to straddle both worlds, rarely speaking, stealing regularly, however, often getting himself into trouble, but somehow always slithers out of it.  His developing conscience is at the center of the picture, as he’s a work in progress, much like the nation as a whole at that stage.  Philomac lives with his father, the principal white landowner of the region, Mick Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), subjecting him to all manner of abuse, yet also treating him like a favored son.  The contempt shown to the Indigenous population is on full display throughout this film, as it typifies how whites view them.  This is most clearly expressed by Harry March, however, in particular during one of the most disturbingly graphic scenes, as one by one he casually closes the shutters of his home on Lizzie, literally locking her inside and making her a prisoner, creating a feeling of dread and slow suffocation until it’s pitch black, using only sound to express the horrors of sexual assault.  Threats to Lizzie suggest March will skin her husband alive if she utters a word about it.  In the aftermath, he kicks them out, as if that was the sole reason to ask for help in the first place, though he really had his eye on a much younger teenage niece that was alertly sent away beforehand.  In conversations with Sam, he could tell the man was touched in the head and not acting right.  But when Philomac arrives on his property, March zealously chains him to a rock, but he’s clever enough to escape anyway, making his way across the desert back to Fred’s ranch, hiding in a nearby structure as he hears March approaching on horseback, drunkenly bellowing for Sam to let him in, knowing Philomac is in there (he isn’t), shooting out the windows and kicking in the door before Sam shoots him dead.  Shooting a white man is about the worst offense possible, as any Indigenous person is presumed guilty by white society, living outside any democratic process, as they were not citizens at the time and had no right to vote.  Most weren’t even paid in wages, but forced to receive alcohol or tobacco instead.  In Australia, Aboriginals weren’t even recognized as “people” until a Constitutional referendum in 1967 included them in the census for allocation of federal seats in Parliament (Australian referendum, 1967 (Aboriginals) - Wikipedia).  Knowing the laws weren’t meant to protect them, Sam and Lizzie set out into the Outback, where a posse led by Sergeant Fletcher, Bryan Brown from BREAKER MORANT (1980), sets out after him. 

With a nod to Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), Fletcher’s rage knows no bounds, developing a manic obsession to track him down, where his feverish anger drives him into the heart of tribal lands, where unforeseen consequences are all around him, including deadly scorpions, tribal attacks, and a mutiny in their midst, suddenly finding himself all alone.  Singlehandedly entering a desolate stretch of white desert (shot in the dry salt flats of Lake Gairdner), a lone speck under an oppressive sun, lost in a sea of emptiness, pushed onwards by madness and delusion, recalling the brilliant desert scene in Stroheim’s Greed (1924), where sheer arrogance plunges him further into the depths of his own doom, eerily shot by Thornton (co-shot with his son Dylan River), mixing close-ups with extreme wide shots, resorting to stark imagery and surreal hallucinations, creating an insurmountable confusion, yet somehow he manages to survive, though still filled with sadistic contempt for the man who got away.  In a strange reversal of perspective, we see Sam and Lizzie actually tracking Fletcher, planting footprints for him to follow, luring him into a death trap, always remaining just out of range, but the hardship becomes too much for Lizzie who announces she’s pregnant.  This has a profound effect on the outcome, as the presumed outlaws suddenly turn themselves in, seen sitting in the middle of the street one morning before Sam is locked up and threatened with a hanging.  The town itself is dangerously unbalanced, with white men largely outnumbering the women, mostly due to land opportunities driven by the cattle industry.  When a judge arrives (Matt Day), there’s no church or courthouse, so seats are set up on the middle of Main Street, with a table for the judge.  Bringing civilized decorum to an unruly town that’s never had to follow rules, Thornton uses an interesting device to illuminate the moral hypocrisy of the town’s lynch-mob mindset, all gathered together in the center of the street to watch a movie, of all things, in this case The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the first full-length narrative feature film, an Australian outlaw epic with sympathies clearly leaning towards the escaped outlaw (gunned down in a police shoot-out 26 years before the release of the film), painting police as comical hooligans, a film that was so successful with the public that a law was introduced (fearing civil disobedience) banning “bushranger” productions, or films about escaped convicts, which remained in effect until the 1940’s.  As much as the town loves and identifies with Ned Kelly, something of an Australian folk hero, they fiercely condemn Sam Kelly (yes, given the same last name) with a pathological bloodlust.  It should be pointed out that at Coniston Station in 1928 (Coniston :: The Coniston Massacre), just 400 kilometers from Alice Springs, more than 100 Aboriginal men, women, and children were slaughtered by murderous shooting parties that went on a two-month shooting binge in retaliation for the death of a local white man who took liberties with a married Indigenous woman, murdered by her husband, with a court inquiry declaring “the killing of all blacks to be justified” afterwards, the last legally sanctioned massacre against Aborigines, where an Indigenous population that was estimated to be about 500,000 in the late 18th century had shrunk to just 31,000 by 1911.  With subtle character development, using dialogue sparingly, and both flashbacks and flash-forwards in presenting a strangely compelling narrative, along with non-professional Aboriginal actors, the director’s use of various desert landscapes is simply stunning, creating a poetic exploration of racism and colonial exploitation.