Up
there
Beneath Clouds, dir. Ivan Sen.
Beneath Clouds is Sen's first feature film. You'd never know. It's rhythmic, uncluttered and straight as a die.
Sen is a Gamilaroi man, and grew up in small-town NSW. Beneath Clouds, at least in part, is a look at life for Indigenous teenagers out of the big cities, but well within the confines (I use that word advisedly) of white society - and like all teenagers they struggle wearily to find the secrets of happiness and purpose.
Lena's
(Dannielle Hall, above left) mother is Aboriginal and her father Irish.
She has fair skin and blue eyes. She has never really known her father
- he is just a face in photos and a few words on the back of a picture
postcard of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Lena lives in a state gently detached
from the world around her - and you can see why. Her little brother is
hauled off to juvenile detention for stealing a couple of cartons of cigarettes,
her best friend is pregnant to a lad who still rides a BMX and her mum
is so unhappy she seems to have stopped loving anyone. Retreating into
dreams of her father and his homeland, Lena imagines him as her only way
out of a life she hates. Armed with a photo album and very little money,
she boards a bus to Sydney.
Outside a roadside restaurant, Lena meets Vaughn (Damian Pitt, above right), a young Aboriginal man who has just broken out of detention by hiding in the back of a Dairy Farm truck. His mother is dying. Having missed her bus because she is vomiting in the toilet, Lena reluctantly hooks up with Vaughn and they begin the long walk to Sydney.
Beneath Clouds explores both landscape and the figures within it with equal intelligence. Like a great sprawling map, the land rolls out in front of the characters as they move closer to understanding why the hell they care about anything. Vaughn and Lena are drawn with a sober honesty and given hypnotically plain language to communicate the most complex, aching emotions.
Sen gets superb performances from Hall and Pitt (neither of whom had acted before). The only complaint I have about Hall receiving the award for best young actress at the Berlin Film Festival (at which Sen was the winner of the Premiere First Movie Award) is that Pitt didn't win the young actors' equivalent. Sen wanted his lead performers to have a great vocal presence - and boy, did he get what he wanted. But for me it was in the moments when they didn't speak - when there was simply nothing to say - that their performances were most startling.
Sen will make lots of good films in the future, I am sure, but don't miss this one. It has an energy and a clarity that is rare.
- Siobhan Jackson
Peace strain
No Man's Land, dir. Danis Tanovic.
Bosnian director Danis Tanovic survived the siege of Sarajevo and worked as an official cameraman with the Bosnian army. He has obviously drawn on these experiences for his debut feature, No Man's Land, a brilliantly plotted black farce set in war-torn former Yugoslavia.
On a beautiful summer's day in 1993, a couple of enemy soldiers find themselves marooned in a trench located midway between two opposing armies. Ciki (Branko Djuric) is a Bosnian, and Nino (Rene Bitorajac) is a Serb. They hate each other on sight and go on hating each other to the end. But they are trapped together by circumstance and a shared desire for self-preservation. And to further complicate matters, a second Bosnian soldier, Cera (Filip Sovagovic), has been booby-trapped with a landmine capable of killing them all. It's Catch-22, Balkans style.
Luckily for the men in the trench, the UN's Sergeant Marchand (George Siatidis) ignores orders forbidding him to intervene and rides to their rescue in his armoured personnel carrier. Then with the willing connivance of a British TV journalist, Jane Livingstone (Katrin Cartlidge), he turns their predicament into an international media event - much to the annoyance of his cynical commander, Colonel Soft (Simon Callow). The Colonel would rather play chess with his mistress than actually try to keep the peace. Eventually, however, courage goes unrewarded, and cynicism is vindicated.
When recently discussing his film, Tanovic remarked that 'disharmony and hate are unnatural, they bring no solution'. Fine sentiments, indeed, but this isn't the lesson of the dark parable he has created. To me, this superb film delivers a harsh and universal homily: war is hell, and hell is other people. Its final image will remain fixed to your retina for days afterwards.
- Brett Evans
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