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. 

Tanna

TANNA          C                    

Australia  Vanuatu  (100 mi)  2015  d:  Martin Butler and Bentley Dean

Rather elementary ethnographical filmmaking, where good intentions unfortunately do not produce great art.  What might have made a terrific documentary is instead converted into a fictional film by a couple of documentary filmmakers with rather pedestrian results.   While the film takes place in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, a volcanic archipelago of islands located about a thousand miles northeast of Australia, the cast is comprised entirely from indigenous members of the local Yakel tribe, where the story is told in mythical status, though it’s based on actual events.  The film perpetuates the same Western stereotypes since the era of King Kong (1933) by treating indigenous nations like some exotic allure, where there’s little attempt to go into complex detail, or provide anything resembling a character study, instead the film provides a threadbare sketch of indigenous life on the island, where we observe fairly predictable social customs in an otherworldly locale.  Unlike Warwick Thornton’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah, which actually gets under the skin of indigenous people, this is all surface textures, where it’s clear the filmmakers don’t have the requisite skills to make a more challenging film.  While the filmmakers apparently spent seven months with the Yakel tribe, there’s little recognition for their rhythm of life or observing their customary rituals, for instance learning how they hunt and produce food, build their homes, heal their sick, pray to spiritual deities, designing something other than a mythological fable might have felt more authentic and sincere, as living in the tropical forests and the element of survival would become paramount, where the audience could develop an invested interest.  Here there’s a huge gulf between the audience and the subject matter, with little bridging the gap. 

The dark-skinned villagers from the island of Tanna live without electricity, wearing grass skirts, collecting water from nearby streams, finding food and making their homes from whatever they find in the forest, where they practice ancient customs known as Kastom.  Their hierarchy includes an elderly chief and a medicine man, with men doing the hunting and women doing the washing and making what little clothes they use, where they practice arranged marriages with outside tribes in order to avoid tribal wars.  Right away we sense some friction, as there is an existing romance secretly happening within the same tribe between Wawa (Marie Wawa) and Dain (Mungau Dain), the grandson of the tribe’s chief.  Apparently one of them left the village for awhile, and what was once childhood friendship blossomed into something more, where most of this is seen through the eyes of a rebellious young child, Selin (Marceline Rofit), Wawa’s younger sister who has a habit of listening to no one and simply doing as she pleases.  When it’s discovered that she routinely travels into the territory of a neighboring tribe known as the Imedin, she is chastised and warned of dire consequences, as she could be killed.  Undaunted by the warnings, she continues to go where she pleases, so her grandfather (Albi Nangia), an elder shaman, decides a spiritual lesson is in order, walking the child to the rim of an active island volcano, known as Yahul, the spirit mother of their tribe, where it is revealed to be a wrathful and protective force, seen gurgling in red-hot embers, continually blowing off steam.  Selim feels the power of Yahul for the first time as they sit on the rim edge, but they are interrupted by members of the Imedin tribe who horrifically beat her grandfather, believing he has used his powers as a medicine man to hex their land, where Selim escapes and runs all the way back home crying for help.  This incident causes villagers to panic, claiming they are losing their people, as apparently Dain lost his mother and father to the Imedin. 

This ruckus creates a ceremonial meeting between tribal chiefs (playing themselves), Yakel Chief Charlie Kahla and Imedin Chief Mikum Tainakou, in an attempt to lower the levels of hostility, “to bury the club,” where it is decreed that violence will subsist when an Imedin warrior is allowed to marry Wawa.  She fears a fate with another tribe and is instead in love with Dain, but their romance is forbidden, so they run away into the heart of the forest and try to survive on their own, but they are continually viewed as trespassers on someone else’s land.  Nonetheless, they lead an idyllic existence on the ocean shores, taking shelter in the tropical cover, where they manage to survive on their own in the lush foliage and hidden streams, choosing not to join the wayward Christian settlement that welcomes them with open arms, as both find them too peculiar, preferring to live on their own.  But the Imedin are incensed that Wawa has refused, sending out a team of warriors to find her and bring her back, plotting to kill Dain on sight.  The Yakel send out their own warriors in hopes of finding them first, while Selin, the little rabble rouser, runs off to help as well.  This choreography of mixed messages and confusion only serves to prolong the inevitable, as the island is too small to avoid detection.  It all comes to a head on the rim of the volcano, with spewing lava and gaseous fumes as a backdrop, as the young couple are found dead in each other’s arms, having eaten poisonous mushrooms.  An African folk tale merging into the forbidden lovers Romeo and Juliet, it’s left for Chief Charlie to meditate on the outcome, producing a song of sorrow that he sings to his tribe announcing no more arranged marriages, that women are now free to pick who they choose in marriage.  Supposedly based on an actual event, there is no mention of why a policy of arranged marriage existed in the first place, which guaranteed marrying outside one’s tribe, as that likely prevented incest from occurring throughout the generations.  In small tribes, more likely than not, nearly everyone is related, where marrying within the tribe could have severe medical consequences.  The film omits this likelihood in its zealous urge to portray a mythical romance where love is stronger than tradition, but tradition is what allowed them to survive as a tribe all these years.  That notwithstanding, the film is Australia’s nomination for Best Foreign Film and has made the next-to-last cut into the final nine films, eventually whittled down to only five.