High Ground

 Seen at the Paramount Theatre, Maryborough, VIC

Cecil says: Beautifully-filmed in Northern Territory, much of it in the fantastic Kakadu National Park, which I haven’t visited for almost 30 years, but which holds a fascination as somehow at the heart and soul of the true Australia. After watching 90 minutes of bloodshed as white settlers battle with local communities about 100 years ago, my overall feeling was: “What the fuck are we doing here?” Why don’t we whites just quit the red centre and the Northern Territory and let the indigenous peoples have their land back, and develop their own culture?

I don’t want to write a spoiler review, but like in the settler novel I just read (“The Secret River” by Kate Grenville), nearly everyone gets killed in ‘High Ground’, so if you’re wary of gory killings or of gunfire, you’ll need to be looking away a fair bit as you watch on the big screen.

But the panoramic filming, the extraordinary wildlife, and the observation of Aboriginal rituals and practices make this an epic experience. The soundtrack, whether the Aboriginal music, the birds screeching, or the cracks and rustles of the undergrowth, is captivating without much, if any, scored orchestrated pieces to it.

Wityana Marika was majestic as the family elder; Jacob Junior Nayinggul superb as the main character Gutjuk (interesting to see that the Nayinggul family are so central to this film in all the credits, and I noticed also that there seem to be no photos of Jacob in any of the cast lists for ‘High Ground’ – I wonder if he’ll be back on our screens any time in the future?).

Among the white characters, Simon Baker does a great job as the attempted conciliator Travis; Jack Thompson is gritty as ever as the chief white personage; and Caren Pistorius has a good go at the missionary’s sister, though she didn’t age much in the 12 or so years of the film and she came through it all pretty unscathed for such a rough, outdoor life as she must have led.

Although both Australian films we have seen this month don’t make me feel great about living here, I did enjoy High Ground a lot more than The Dry. There is hope if the indigenous culture can be allowed to flourish again; if we do listen to the wind, the sky and the earth, to paraphrase what the elder says at one point.

****

 

Bea says:  One benefit of Covid seems to be that the Australian film industry has been able to continue, and so the last two films we have seen are both locally made.  High Ground is one of them. 

 The film has been compared to the John Ford-style Westerns, and having seen it I agree; with a white settler vs Indigenous population theme, and lots of riding though canyons (albeit canyons with lots of tropical plant as the film takes place in Kakadu) with eerie feelings of being watched. 

 The title of the film is taken from this; taking the high ground is important - it gives a view of all oncomers and incomers.  Possibly it also operates at a metaphorical level (before I saw the film I thought it would refer more to this - taking the high ground morally and all the contradictions that entails) but actually that is not explicit in the film, though it was perhaps something they were trying to do; perhaps with the missionary characters who instead are portrayed quite sympathetically.

 To some degree I was disappointed with the Western aspect of the film.  That bit of it felt quite derivative, exclusively male, and not very contemporary.  The Indigenous people in the film do have a fairly strong role and are relatively well explored in terms of the knowledge of tradition, language, customs, food and medicine (although perhaps there could have been more of this). 

 Massacres are a key part of the action, but the more insidious erosion of culture through missionary work, settlement and government policy is really only lightly touched upon.  The missionary sister Claire looks far too modern, and doesn't age at all over a 20-30 year period (very hard to believe when living in a wooden shed in a harsh, hot and very remote tropical climate, particularly as she is rarely shot wearing any kind of hat or sun protection). 

 It is not a feel-good film at all, although worth seeing as there are just so few films that give any airspace at all to Australia's Indigenous people and their stories.  I just wish it hadn't tried to be a Western - that is such a problematic genre in terms of Indigenous relations and portrayals. 

** .5

The Dry

 Seen at the Bay Cinema, Brighton, VIC

Bea says:  I was keen to see this as I had read the much-lauded book a few years ago.  I had a few reservations about the book at the time, but always enjoy a bit of a crime/mystery story and this one is set more or less in the part of the world I find myself living in at the moment.

 The plot revolves around a high-level police officer (Aaron Falk, played by Eric Bana), now working in Melbourne in a desk position who returns to his home town in country Victoria to attend a funeral of a peer.  The death is considered to be a murder-suicide (and now having lived in Australia for a few years I am newly struck how common this is on remote properties), but Aaron begins to dig around, which is at first welcomed by the local police, but as suspicion starts to fall on him, it is less well received. 

 Aaron has some skeletons in his own closet, which start to come out, and although he goes on to solve the murder and be lauded by the town, the film has a strong element of noir and as a result an air of darkness which in fact pretty accurately reflects life in country Australia. 

 I left Australia prior to the Millennium drought, and the long years of Howard's conservative government, and have been struck since I returned by the change in country towns which now look hard-up and depressed, particularly when compared to the glittering boom town cities on the coast.  Both the film and the book capture this despair and the emptiness left by it in people's lives and the culture of Australia well, but it is not uplifting viewing at all.

 My main concern with the film, and with the book, is that it felt like two stories in one.  I'm fairly sure this author had two different novels drafted out and combined them to make the book and film - there are, for example, two endings (one where the modern murder is solved, and one where the historical one is).  The two sit a bit awkwardly for me (and if the two stories were intentional it isn't particularly well done in my view), but it is a relatively minor point and Cecil for example didn't really notice this aspect of the story at all.

 Definitely worth a watch, but not if you need cheering up! 

***

 

 Cecil says: The storyline of The Dry was compelling enough to keep me interested for the duration of the film, though there was something of a sense of foreboding over the whole thing, it left me thinking life in country Victoria can be pretty grim at times, and as Bea and I discussed it on our way home afterwards, I realised that everything I was saying about it sounded negative.

So where does leave us?

Well, there’s the plot, first. Experienced Melbourne-based detective comes back to his home town after an apparent murder-suicide case took place there AND he received a note from someone in the town about having lied, and needing to tell the truth. He gets involved in helping the local cop investigate the killings, but meantime there is a fair bit of hostility to him from some of the town’s residents because of his own involvement with a teenage girl who died in the local river when he was still at school.

And basically you need to keep an eye on both stories – about both sets of deaths – as the film develops, with quite a lot of flashback footage of the river bank frolics of the teenagers which ended in disaster. The flashback phenomenon in story-telling is something I tend to find rather annoying, and definitely a 21^st century fashion in both novel-writing and film-making (look at the dreadful re-make of Little Women for how NOT to do it). It’s OK in The Dry once you work out which of the teenage girls is the one who died and which is still living in the town some 20 years on…

The town is full of pretty bogan rednecks, and there is a lot of violence and drinking down at the pub. It’d be enough to put me off living in country Victoria if I wasn’t already doing so…

One of these aggressive blokes, Grant, has a go at our hero Melbourne-cop, but then gets roughed up himself soon after as the suspicion falls briefly on him. But I don’t believe an experienced detective from Melbourne would immediately assume that a note saying “Grant?” had to refer to the bloke who had it in for him. Grant, after all, is also a noun, which could quite plausibly have been the reference in the note and a decent cop would have picked that up.

So, as well as the violence, the drinking, one of the newer arrivals in town is struggling with racist attitudes, so again this really doesn’t paint a brilliant picture of small town Australia…

And then it’s dry, and that’s the whole point. The river in which the teenager drowned all those years ago is just a dry, muddy track now, and although we have had a fair dowsing of rain since we saw the film, this is the time of year when I almost lose the will to live myself, as the barren brown dryness seems interminable after weeks and weeks without rain.

So, no, The Dry didn’t leave me in good spirits, but maybe that says as much about my current feelings on country Australia as it does about The Dry itself.

But, as another local to me who saw the film and loved it said, it was refreshing to see a film set exclusively in country Victoria, and it felt like the camera was on our lives here for the first time. She also thought the character of the local cop, doing his best to find a way through, managing local sentiment whole doing his job as a cop, was the most sympathetic of all of them. I guess maybe she was right…

***