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.    

Amrum

 

Fatih Akin with Hark Bohm

Director Fatih Akin

Akin with Matthias Schweighöfer and Diane Kruger

Akin with Hark Bohm

Screenwriter Hark Bohm

AMRUM        B+                                                                                                                      Germany  (93 mi)  2025  d: Fatih Akin

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT                                                                                                      by Fatih Akin

Hark Bohm wrote a screenplay full of poetry, grace, and suspense — Amrum. When he realized that he would no longer be able to make the film himself, he asked me. I hesitated — after all, I am an auteur filmmaker who must always find a personal connection to the material. In any case, the screenplay had to be rewritten, as it was much too long. Since Hark writes everything by hand, his own revision would have taken too much time. I offered to take on the rewrite. Hark agreed. In the process, the story grew close to my heart. It was like adopting a child — at some point, you no longer question it, you simply love it unconditionally.

At first, I conceived the whole thing as an experimental film: how can I manage to shoot a Hark Bohm film? I revisited his work, analyzing his camera angles, his direction of actors, his editing — and above all, his attitude. But the closer the shoot approached, the more I realized that this was nonsense. I have to make my own film!

From that realization, everything started to fall into place. The films that came to mind when Hark first told me the story were Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine by Vittorio De Sica. The scenes where Nanning searches for driftwood at night made me think of The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton. The whole film was supposed to breathe the spirit of Stand by Me by Rob Reiner — thus, my cinematic upbringing became the first personal connection to the film. Others followed.

But the most important realization came to me shortly before completion earlier this year: friends who had been living in a kind of Disneyland version of Germany, have started talking about leaving the country. But Goethe said: "Where we are educated, there is our homeland." And I don't want to leave it to the Nazis.

Amrum tells of expulsion from paradise. For me, the film became a mission — a journey into the depths of my "German soul." Perhaps it was the last lesson that Master Hark Bohm taught me: cinema remains an eternal mystery.

There are very few films that accurately depict Nazi sympathizers with any degree of humanity, yet this is no ordinary film, introduced as “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin,” who adapts a first-time, autobiographical novel by the same name based on the childhood memories of German actor, author, and film director Hark Bohm, a long-standing friend of the director, most closely associated as an actor in a dozen films made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died just two months after the film was released.  Both deeply connected to Hamburg, Bohm originally intended to direct the movie himself, but his declining health forced him to hand over the project to Akin.  All the more emotionally powerful because of its dramatic restraint, there’s a lot of heart and soul in this picture, which distinguishes it from others, beautifully blending a tender coming-of-age story about the loss of innocence with the barbarism of the adult world, set against the waning days of the Third Reich, defined by a crushing ideological collapse and moral disorientation, becoming a painterly canvas that accentuates the psychological toll of the characters and thoughtfully expands filmmaker Fatih Akin’s career-spanning exploration of German identity.  Spending most of his career focused on non-ethnic Germans and their experience in German society, this is inspired by Hark Bohm’s own published autobiographical memories growing up as the son of a high-ranking Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) officer during the final days of World War II on Amrum, part of the sparsely populated North Frisian Islands in the North Sea.  It took considerable effort on the part of the entire country to acknowledge mistakes and correct the unspeakable historical sins of the past, where acknowledging guilt is part of a pervasive collective sentiment present in the German national consciousness to the point of becoming an essential part of its postwar identity, which has often been used to justify paradoxical positions, such as the unconditional defense of a genocidal state like Israel, using the memory of the Holocaust as a moral shield against any form of valid criticism or questioning.  With their home in Hamburg destroyed in an Allied bombing campaign, he and his family were forced to relocate to the safer environment of a quiet, rural island, joining others from the “mainland” who have evacuated from their bombed-out cities.  Given very limited distribution, told from the vantage point of twelve-year old Nanning (newcomer Jasper Billerbeck, who was discovered during a sailing training in Lower Saxony, though Bohm was actually only six at the time, too young for the conscientiously-evolving thoughts entrusted to him), who is living with his staunch Nazi-supporting mother Hille (Laura Tonke) in the later stages of pregnancy, his younger brother Macker (Tjard Nissen), and his Aunt Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), spending most of his time working in the potato fields of a nearby farm of Tessa (Diane Kruger), an ardent anti-fascist, who rewards him with milk and food for the chickens,  As a squadron of Allied bombers can be seen overhead, a new group of tattered refugees arrives by horse cart, as the Russians are reportedly only 50 kilometers from Berlin, mostly stared at as outsiders, and while they are treated differently, not really wanted or appreciated, they are all Germans. 

A quiet, atmospherically dense drama that is less politically than humanly told, remarkably distinct in its perspective, essentially a film about maturation, disappointment, and the search for a place in a world in upheaval, Akin beautifully establishes the daily rhythm of life on the tiny island, unraveling in small vignettes that have an accumulative power, becoming something uniquely different, yet also dramatically powerful, turning collective war trauma into a chamber play that is emotionally and psychologically complex.  Nanning has a nearby friend in Tessa’s son Hermann (Kian Köppke), about his same age, who borrows his copy of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where they compare notes about what is considered an Amrumer islander, as they have their own language and history, with historical ties to Denmark, renowned as skilled whalers and seafarers, though today their economy has shifted almost entirely from seafaring to agriculture, sustainable tourism, and nature preservation, as the island sits within the protected Schleswig-Holstein Wadden Sea National Park near the border with Denmark.  Offering freedom and adventure, Nanning hardly goes to school anymore, especially since he is teased there by the other children, who reject him for not being from Amrum and not speaking “their” northern Frisian dialect (the first movie to extensively feature Öömrang), as he was born in Hamburg, continually viewed as an outsider, just like the other war refugees, discovering, even from a child’s eyes, that hatred is part of the human condition.  His parents are fanatical Nazis, where a portrait of Adolf Hitler hangs on the wall in his kitchen, a swastika flag flies outside the house, with his mother being a Bund Deutscher Mädel or BDM leader (female branch of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany), his father a Nazi SS Officer who has written numerous books on eugenics, his Uncle Onno (Jan Georg Schütte) is a German Socialist Party board member on the neighboring island of Föhr, while Nanning himself is a member of the Hitler Youth, and proudly wears the uniform.  Caught up in the ambiguity of trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t align with what he’s been taught, Nanning learns about his parents’ hideous convictions and grotesque past, as Akin excels in slowly doling out information, heightening the disarmingly poetic visual style while prolonging the suspense.  One of the few figures Nanning can look up to is his Uncle Theo (Matthias Schweighöfer), who gifted him a whale’s tooth knife before he left for New York City (noting that more Amrumers live in New York City than there are on Amrum).  Over the course of the film, Nanning learns his Uncle Theo was exiled or estranged from the family because Nanning’s parents (and relatives) turned their backs and refused to help Theo’s Jewish fiancée escape a concentration camp, where she was subsequently murdered by the Nazis.  Nanning, of course, has little understanding of what any of this means, finding it hard to believe his parents would do something like that, facing difficult moral dilemmas without providing simple solutions, as the film centers on the child’s slowly realized recognition of his parents’ sin.

From the maker of HEAD-ON (2004), The Edge of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite) (2007), and 2017 Top Ten List #9 In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts), which Bohm co-wrote, Akin’s films tend to be ambitious, raw, and emotionally explosive, where anger, pain, and rebellion simmer, exploring subjects like ethnic identity, immigration, and cultural conflict, yet this is a very different film, on a much smaller scale, calmer, unusually measured, more intimately spare and introspectively subdued, told through the warmth of a child’s eyes, where the massive sky and setting sun merge above the restless sea, with wind in the dunes and water everywhere, featuring plenty of scenes of animals in their natural environment, like beetles on blades of grass, waterfowl on the beach, honey bees, geese in flight, or desolate mudflat sequences that reveal what the tide has brought in, which feel more like poetic Terrence Malick touches. Cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub captures Amrum’s stark and unforgiving landscapes through expansive wide shots, often pulling back to reveal a vast, water-saturated terrain that feels suspended in time, with the island dotted with thatched cottages.  The film turns when Nanning innocently announces that he’s heard that the war may be over soon, where he’s excited about the prospects of seeing his father again, but his mother, a prisoner of her blind allegiance to Nazi ideology, sternly sets him straight, indicating this kind of talk only weakens the troop’s morale, as they are risking their lives every day fighting for the Fatherland, claiming whoever told him that deserves to be thoroughly punished.  Despite their hardships, Nanning’s life on the beautiful and windswept island is mostly idyllic, where his mother’s aggressive posture takes him by surprise, not really knowing what to make of it.  After hearing the actual news of Germany’s imminent defeat on the radio, followed shortly afterwards with Hitler’s demise, Hille takes a turn for the worse, falling into a deep depression, keeping to herself, refusing to eat, even after the birth of her child, realizing that the entire foundation of their beliefs, the very social structure that sustained them, is close to total collapse, emblematic of the collective trauma of the nation, wondering “What kind of world is this for a child to grow up in?”  All she talks about is wanting white bread with butter and honey, precious commodities that are nearly impossible to find, but that doesn’t stop Nanning from looking for them anyway, literally scouring the island, discovering it is filled with people responding to Germany’s impending defeat, with some relieved, some fearful, and some in denial.  In a succession of encounters that will highlight the fractures that tear this small society apart, caught up in the enclosed and restricted space, his entire family is viewed as strangers, treated with the prejudice and hostility normally reserved for foreigners, despite the fact they have owned a house on the island for countless generations, discovering how far removed their life is from the others who are not Nazi sympathizers and just want the war to be over, vehemently regarding his family as outsiders whose militaristic views are barely tolerated, as so many of their Amrumer neighbors have immigrant relatives fighting in the U.S. army.     

Akin presents a devastated and unstructured society comprised of convinced Nazis who cling to lies to the very end, war refugees forced to leave everything behind, people thirsting for personal revenge against the Nazi regime, and those who simply wished to be left alone, while addressing the issue of German collective guilt, the legacy of National Socialism, and the question of how this burden would continue to affect later generations.  On some of his adventures across the island he is joined by Hermann, whose mother is demonstrably anti-Hitler, but his grandfather, Grandpa Arjan (Lars Jessen), teaches Nanning how to gut and skin a rabbit, while also discovering his grandfather’s hidden radio tuned to foreign enemy stations that play American jazz, like Fred Astaire’s Cheek to Cheek, Fred Astaire - Cheek To Cheek 1935 (Leo Reisman) (Irving ... YouTube (3:17), or later after the war is over we hear the celebratory sounds of Louis Armstrong’s Stardust, Louis Armstrong- Stardust YouTube (3:34).  He also drops in on an old whaler, Sam Gangsters (Detlev Buck), who teaches him the seal dance, laying on the beach on his stomach while kicking his rear legs, luring seals in from the ocean where Sam can shoot them.  Nanning’s journey is interrupted by a group of war refugees who take advantage of their strength in numbers, stealing what he was gathering for his mother, while beating him up in the process.  Wearing his Hitler Youth uniform, he makes a bike crossing through the mudflats during low tide to visit his Uncle Onno on a neighboring island, seeking sugar for his mother, but he has to recite a Nazi pledge before his uncle will part with it.  Easily the most harrowing experience is his return back home, as the tide has risen, making passage nearly impossible, where he has to wade through water above his shoulders, holding the sugar over his head while steering the bike underwater, until eventually it is too much, where he has to swim, losing his aunt’s bike in the process, returning the next day for butter, only to be confronted by one of the bullies on the journey home, sending them both back into the sea, where Nanning actually ends up saving the other kid from drowning, much to his sister’s gratitude, calmly leaving afterwards with the butter intact.  He has a dream afterwards of meeting his Uncle Theo on the beach, protesting his innocence by stating, “What my parents did isn't my fault.”  His uncle reminds him, “You are not to blame, but you are still involved.”  You can’t choose your parents, but therein lies an underlying theme, that you cannot escape your past and the questions it raises, as Nanning’s emerging moral conscience suddenly awakes to the moral collapse around him, expressing an enduring need for compassion.  In a monumental tribute, set to the dreamlike soundtrack of Hainbach’s Amrum (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) YouTube (7:12), an experimental electronic composer, there is a close up at the end of Hark Bohm with the sun shining on his face, the grownup version of Nanning looking out into the ocean at the setting sun, who lived to see the release of the film, where Akin pays him the ultimate memorial tribute by breathing life into his final screenplay.