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Article Excerpt
Maybe it was Jindabyne that did it. Ray Lawrence's beautifully shot, stylishly directed film hit London as the opening presentation of the London Australian film festival, a flagship event for the presentation/flogging of Australian culture. Having gained five-star reviews from a selection of Australian critics, it was greeted with great expectations. For most of the audience it did not disappoint. And not for the first time in an Australian cinema, one looked around in disbelief to see if anyone else thought what was on the screen was unutterably bogus.
If Jindabyne were simply another movie that had gone wrong somewhere, it would be of no import. But it is the very manner of its failure, in contrast to the universal praise it has received, that makes it a symbol of a wrong-turning.
Jindabyne begins with a young Aboriginal woman driving along a country road and being persuaded to pull over by a fairly creepy older man in a truck. Before we can find out what has happened to her, we move to the story of Claire and Stewart, an American woman and Irish man, and their friends, living in Jindabyne.
When four of the men from Jindabyne, including Stewart, set out on a much-looked-forward to fishing trip, they stumble across the body of the woman seen in the film's opening--clearly violently murdered. Rather than returning to town to report the finding, the men decide to continue their fishing trip, and secure her body by tieing it to a tree. When they do finally make a report, all hell breaks loose both publicly and in their relationships. Tensions rise between the town's Aboriginal and white communities, but the men are reviled by both whites and blacks.
Claire, disturbed by her husband's choice, and feeling distanced from him, becomes increasingly obsessed with making some sort of connection with the Aboriginal community, and with the dead woman's family. With the network of white friendships frayed and riven by the event, Claire tries to persuade her family and friends to come with her to the traditional funeral smoking ceremony. They refuse, but eventually follow her there, where Stewart goes to the father of the woman and asks for forgiveness. The father pauses a moment, and then strikes him, refusing his apology.
That final moment probably saves Jindabyne from full-bore mawkishness--an American version would most likely have ended in a deep hug and swelling music. Leaving aside the relatively high quality of the craft, the film follows the usual groove of fully developing the white characters while leaving the black ones as mere functions of the plot--the dead woman's father, friend, etc.--the white community as riven and complex, the black community as whole and undifferentiated.
Perhaps this is intended as a representation of the way in which white people see black people, but it could hardly be called a critical engagement or foregrounding of this perspective. The result is so inevitable that the cultural studies essays could almost have been written before shooting began. The whites are people of culture, politics and history; the blacks are people of nature, pre-political unity, and timelessness. There are scenes that unfold in your head before they appear on the screen. As soon as you see Claire appear at the funeral you know that she will be challenged by an angry young man, who will subside instantly when a woman elder shouts 'siddown boy!', the boundary-crossing youngster instantly brought under the rule of the Law.
The whites by contrast can't get their act together for the last half of the film, until they attend the funeral and are awed into solemnity. The allegory of small town/anxious, rootless whites/knowing grounded blacks with the nation at large is groaningly obvious, made more so by the selection of Jindabyne--the town buried beneath the waves by development, a lost world beneath the surface.
(In fact, the town had served an almost identical symbolic function for an earlier film, Somersault, released barely three years ago. This would indicate such a grevious shortage of ready-made symbols for Australian cinema that the funding bodies may want to consider a rationing system.)
But Jindabyne is not merely an average attempt at political symbolism, as is revealed by the history of the story it tells. It is an adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story So Much Water So Close To Home, which has already been adapted in Robert Altman's portmanteau Carver adaptation Short Cuts.
Carver was a white, working-class Midwest American, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty. Married twice, divorced, father of three, bankrupt and alcoholic by the age of thirty, Carver pioneered a style that became known (unfortunately) as 'dirty realism'--paired-down stories, overwhelmingly dealing with low-income, white Midwesterners and a world of motels, malls, tract housing, convenience stores and bars.
Though influenced by such writers as James Farrell and Upton Sinclair, its mood is entirely different to working-class writing, which could draw on the dramatic nature of industrial work and the socialist movement to find a heroic quality amidst oppression. Carver's mood is overwhelmingly Chekhovian: his characters are trapped in a Midwest that industry, unions and prosperous organic cities have long since departed; work in service industries and live in formless suburban sprawl. Their lives are networks of private associations bounded by television, and life's meanings and intensities are found in connection, or the failure thereof, between people.
As Midwest whites they lack even the vestigial collectivity of a minority ethnic identity. Overwhelmingly what defines their existence is the absence of big moments where people 'find out what it is all for'.
In Carver's story the discovery of the woman's body is told flatly by Claire, in retrospect. Her reflection upon it leads into a longer reflection on life's drift, on how even a murder and a scandal fails...
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