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SFF 2013 Film Review: Mystery Road

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2013, Film, Sydney Film Festival

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Aaron Pedersen, Australian, detective, drugs, High Noon, Hugo Weaving, Indigenous, Ivan Sen, Jack Charles, John Wayne, murder, Mystery Road, prostitution, Rio Bravo, SFF, Sydney Film Festival, trucks, Western

mystery roadAt the opening night of the 60th Sydney Film Festival, director Ivan Sen and his leading man, Aaron Pedersen, spoke graciously of all the supporting performers in the film. Such praise was afforded them, because almost all other praise could only go to Sen, who added, charmingly, “I think I did everything else.”

Essentially a western, Mystery Road follows Jay Swan, an indigenous police detective, who, after an unexplained – presumably work related – stint in “the big smoke” returns to his hometown in central Queensland when the body of a local girl is found under the highway.

Jay is met with no warm returns, not from his former “colleagues” of the local police or by his ex or their teenage daughter. Determined to solve his first big case, Jay learns that the girls murder is linked to underage prostitution and drug trafficking and fails to solicit any support from the community in bringing such corruption to an end.

In fact, no one wants to help him. Which, aside from all the cowboy hats and the desert-like surroundings, brings classics like High Noon and Rio Bravo to mind and the violent finale/showdown brings it on home. The film is also, and largely so, a murder mystery but the procedural details – the film is almost entirely composed of interviews conducted by Swan – tend only to lay on thick the cultural divide that he is caught in, rather than involve you in any suspicions.

Pedersen is a strange cowboy, and it is hard to know where he begins and the character of Jay Swan ends. As Jay, he is uncomfortable in his clothes, an indigenous man with a badge, the kind of mix-up that has him walking a narrow line between the two extremely divided groups – there is a fantastic scene of him showing a local boy his gun in exchange for information. He also has a distinctive walk. Not quite John Wayne’s slanted swagger, but a heaviness in his stride that makes him both intimidating and awkward. The police, who include Hugo Weaving, are secretive and smart-mouthed, and have some of the worst on-screen eating habits to date. Jay’s disgust with these white fellas is written almost permanently on his face.

Sen has constructed a slow-burning detective-western that does have an impressive cast of mostly minor characters – the highlight of which is an eccentric, happy-go-lucky Jack Charles, as an elder who appears to be the only well-wisher of the detective’s acquaintance. The film exhibits minimal action other than a sudden and significant amount toward the end, which is worth the wait. Aside from the re-tooling of all the characters’ vocals – which were incredibly deep and loud (though, perhaps the cinema’s fault) – and some strange framing choices, Mystery Road is a good Australian film and rare insight into indigenous life, both in a day-to-day dialogue and considering the racial myths that appear to be perpetuated – by both sides – about which side of the law a black fella belongs, and what lawfulness means in a community that no longer cares.

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The Woman In The Fifth

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2011, Film

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daughter, ethan hawke, france, glasses, kristen scott thomas, mental illness, murder, paris, woman in the fifth, writer's block

Ethan Hawke stars as Tom, a creepy American university professor who arrives in Paris to stalk his ex-wife and young daughter. His wife calls the police and he absconds, encountering subsequent bad luck and winding up broke in a dive of a hotel run by seedy, criminal seeming people. Motivated by a desperate bid for reunification with his daughter, Tom tries to establish himself in Paris despite these somewhat dire circumstances.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mysterious Margit who for some strange reason is the film’s namesake. She provides nurture and romance to Tom, and having previously been the wife of a writer, encourages him to return to writing and work on his second novel but there is something wrong with what freedom and pleasure she bolsters him up.

The film is mysterious but equally irritating. Photographer Ryszard Lenczewski paints Tom’s world in fragments, his gaze obstructed by blurry visions through his own glasses, through leaves and fences and security cameras. The lens motif is a familiar tool for experiments in narrative confusion in recent filmmaking but even after attempting to decipher the puzzles of Tom’s existence, whatever grainy underlying veracities, however confusing, are uninteresting.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski gets away with considerable sexism and racism by merely filtering it through an unreliable and unlikeable narrator but does device delineate or justify these characterisations? The French-Arab owner of the hotel and the French-African tenant are completely perverse, criminal, and unhygienic. They’re the only people in the film who make Tom look good. The Polish, immaculate, Ania (Joanna Kulig) – who is somehow in bed with this dangerous hotel owner – appears to require some kind of rescue from Tom and enchants him with Polish poems and songs – which makes her so explicitly an object of perversion.

Tom often finds himself on the other side of closed doors, shut off from others, but we’re grateful for that. He is pathetic, tightly wound and worrying on screen. His affairs are strange. All his relationships with women are fruitless and our own disinterest in Tom, and general confusion about what on Earth the film is going for, makes us eagerly await the end of every scene or for a door to open, just to see if some clear idea, or an unhindered frame might redeem this enormously flat depiction of madness and writer’s block.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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