this is the 2007 aussie movie that won a ton of aussie awards and that one can watch “instantly” on netflix if one has fast internet access (michael, are you still cut off from the world?). i’ve been away from movies and tv shows for a long time because i developed a strange phobia towards live screens — they weren’t speaking to me or telling me what to do or anything like that, just making me very nervous. but now i’m back, and i can watch pretty much anything except sci-fi, which proves to me that my strange phobia had no relation whatsoever to content, as i always claimed. so i’ll write about this movie out of sheer happiness and relief at my return to the pleasures of cinema.
it’s a small movie with a small plot, but it’s very beautiful and satisfying. it opens with a train massacre in melbourne in which seven people are brutally shot (we don’t see the shooting) but a young woman is spared. after having spent some quality time with the shooter and his gun, the young woman is understandably traumatized and scared out of her mind.
on the other side of town (or maybe the same side, but leading an entirely unrelated life) a low-level male cop with tinnitus and black-out spells is trying and failing to get sick time from his hard-ass boss, and also trying to get along with his live-in girlfriend. the two like each other, but the tinnitus and the fear of what it may signify make the cop feel withdrawn, which irritates the girlfriend.
eventually the scared young woman and the scared young cop meet.
this is a thriller, in the sense that there are shootings and quite some blood. mostly, though, it’s a character study on isolation and fear and community connections. i love the way non-american movies portray the police. there’s no shouting or bossing around and there are few guns. there’s no tension. there’s no constant sense of danger. it all seems rather ordinary and benign. the strange thing is that, here, there should in fact be a great sense of danger because there are all sorts of reasons for there to be danger, yet, even though we see why there should be danger and why we should be tense and scared, we are more mesmerized than afraid. we feel for the girl but see the world through the eyes of the tinnitus-ridden cop, who’s too lazy or too depressed or too worried to take things very seriously.
most of the movie, therefore, consists of people chatting in the caravan to which the cop is assigned so that community people might be able walk in with tips at any hour of the day or the night. all sorts of people drop by, and this is the joy of the film. there are some really nice moments, in particular: when a murdered woman’s fiancee goes ballistic and throws a bottle of liquor against the caravan, and the cop holds him up with a pepper spray can, even though he has a gun in his holster. the following day the guy comes around to apologize and the two start hanging out and chewing the fat. other nice moment: a neighborhood guy with a mental disability who’s everyone protegee steels the cop’s hat and takes pictures of his dog with the cop’s hat on. the cop has to go find the guy to get the cap back. other nice scene: one of the two detectives assigned to the case is a woman with a hare lip who exudes competence, assurance, and kindness, and for some reason we immediately find her attractive in all the right ways in spite of her deformity.
when the young woman that was on the train and the tinnitus cop finally meet, it’s like we have been waiting for this the whole movie, even though we couldn’t quite imagine how it would happen. they have a moving conversation about very serious things, and we know that the cop is the only one who really knows what the woman is going through, because he’s scared, too. but it’s all understated and easy and no big deal, and this is the best thing about this movie, that everything is no big deal, alongside the many sweet moments, the beautiful colors, the narrow-angle shots, and the cop’s and the girl’s entirely captivating faces.
Hey Gio! Welcome back to movieworld….
I loved this movie, too, so much so that it’s on my best-of list for the year. And we did have a brief, less-developed conversation about it here, but confusingly buried underneath a paragraph about Indiana Jones. (Sorry.) I recall being startled, dazzled about what kind of movie it was — and my engagement with such genre concerns echoed the way we engaged with characters, and the way they engage with each other: you think x, but then they defy expectations with y, and … it just develops a complexity and ambiguity that suggests whole rich storylines veering off from every character, in all dimensions.
Great film! Great review, Gio!
Yes, welcome back, Gio. Are you doing any EFCA stuff down in Miami?
you’re so right, mike. the film felt like real life, with all sorts of only marginally relevant encounters going on, and its struggle with the central issue of narrative coherence vs. representation of stuff-like-it-happens felt to me so focused, especially for a first film. i actually did a search on the blog to see if it had already been discussed, but when i got to the indiana jones thread thought it couldn’t possibly be there…
chris, i had to google EFCA and the first thing that came up was “Features association of some 1250 autonomous churches united by a mutual commitment to serve the Lord Jesus Christ with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.” i thought you had gone mad. but no, my cheering for EFCA is confined to mad facebook group joining. how about you?
hiya jeffy.
I guess it says all you need to know about the chances of passage in the Senate that Google doesn’t jump straight to ‘Employee Free Choice Act.’ I know you have done a lot a labor support work so I thought maybe it was a big deal down where you are (in the land of ‘Burn Notice’). Here is swing state Ohio there is a full court press on to get academics to publically endorse EFCA and write op-eds in its favor.
haha. florida in not a strong labor state, chris. we still have slave labor — don’t know if you heard about the immokalee workers and their struggle to get taco bell to pay 1 cent more for tomatoes. pretty impressive victory by an entirely grassroots organization.
Yay Gio! Where’s ya been???
Hi Gio! No, I’m fully plugged in with a high-speed Internet connection these days. Can you say more about these screens–what exactly makes you nervous? Was it Billy Mays shouting at you?
wow, michael, i go away for a week or two and whaddyaknow, you get high speed net connection! great!
i think it was just the stimulation, really. i’ve never liked tv for the same reason. with the movies it started some time ago, i had to watch a movie in 3, 4, then 5, than forever takes. then i couldn’t watch them anymore. i had to keep on stopping and get up. i’d watch 10 mins and it felt like 10 hours. and then i started getting nervous, like it was too much and i had to get away. but in the last couple of weeks i have watched movies through without a hitch, so beats me, you know? i don’t have an explanation.
how about you? still watching movies in long, long stretches of days/weeks? i thought of you a lot when that was going on. and it’s not like i think it’s over for good, either. if i couldn’t watch a movie tonight i wouldn’t be surprised at all!
I find that now I can typically watch a movie in two sittings at home–I have started to watch TV and movies on the computer which seems to fix my attention better. Of course, the ideal is an actual theater where I am free from distractions–there I can even get through Benjamin Button . The portable DVD players is great, too–when I’m in my office I can watch all of Tarkovsky straight through, if it keeps me away from grading.
I mostly watch Tarkovsky on my iPod, but only during family meals.
i wander if it is the dvd player or the office.
i find the computer less hard to handle, too, even at home.
but we probably have opposite problems. i *need* the distractions to keep myself from getting too absorbed by the medium, which makes me nervous.
how nice to compare pathologies… :)
(naughty jeff)
I’m afraid the TV shatters my attention and all I can do is switch idiotically from channel to channel–I start at channel 2, our local station which typically shows re-runs of footage from the local Musikfest of folks doing the chicken dance to polka music–then I go all the way up to channel #124 which is the hunting or “outdoors” channel (always a couple of guys aiming at a “10-point Buck” or whatever the hell it is that they do)…then since that takes a good 10-15 minutes, I have to start all over again, because the programs may have changed. The time really flies by. The computer tends to focus my attention because I have to actively choose what I’m watching and then sit there in my straight-backed chair. The theater focuses my attention because I paid for the thing (even when it’s something dreadful like The Spirit . I have many strategies to kind of “outwit” my natural lack of attention and inability to focus–sometimes I just down a handful of Ritalin and stare at the patterns in the fireplace (with or without a fire).