Strangerland

Synopsis: A married couple, Catherine and Martin Parker (Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes), find their  life in an outback Australian town thrown into upheaval after their two teenage children disappear in the surrounding desert.

It is quite surprising to me that from the very opening shots of Strangerland I was put in mind of Rachel Perkins’ 2001 film, One Night The Moon. Surprising because I knew nothing of the story and yet both films deal with an Anglo-Celtic couple facing the ordeal of their children lost in the inhospitable reaches of this land in which we live but is never our home. Perhaps it was P.J. Dillon’s marvellous high-definition lensing of the deserted streetscapes and the silent landscape surrounding them combined with Keefus Ciancia’s quietly foreboding score that suggest an impending misadventure but that the connection should be so effectively suggested by so little continues to puzzle me.

Thematic closeness aside, Kim Farrant’s film is a much larger scaled and dramatically intricate film at whose heart lies a fine script by Michael Kinirons and Fiona Seres from the latter’s original story.  Where this leaves off and Farrant’s direction take over  is impossible to say but what makes the film so rewarding is its refusal to be dominated by well-worn conventions of plotting, manipulative dramatic effects or too comfortable characterizations. Farrant comes from a background in documentary film-making and this perhaps explains why her first fiction feature is so grounded in the reality of human psychology and behaviour rather than relying on the pattern-book of tried and true scripting practices. One of the great strengths of Strangerland is that it uses the unique representational power of cinema to suggest meaning rather than to simply illustrate the text on which it depends.

Most striking in this respect is the character of Catherine who is very much the film’s centre of attention.  Kidman, who in recent years has given us an impressive number of edgy unconventional performances, does a superb job in bringing to life a woman grown apart from her husband, unknown to her kids and unable to assuage her profoundly loneliness. The disappearance of her children brings her existential malaise to a head causing her resignation to fracture in series of increasingly extreme behaviours. From all three perspectives, of writing, performance and direction, the film captures with rarely seen empathy the experience of a woman bound by her sex.

Opposite her, the characters of Catherine’s husband and the policeman investigating the children’s disappearance (Hugo Weaving) although not so prominently on show are also drawn with both precision and nuance. It is somewhat of a pity that Guy Pearce passed on playing the role of the husband, more so for the distinctive Australian stamp it would have given the production than for a any problem with Fiennes, who seems to get more British as the film progresses but whose inherent lack of expression well fits the character of the dutiful but distant spouse.  Weaving, who has played more cops in his career than most people have had hot diners, slides into his role with easy familiarity, his quietly troubled character providing some degree of kinship for the estranged Catherine.  Impressive support performances also come from Maddison Brown and Nicholas Hamilton as the children and Meyne Wyatt as Burtie, a young Aboriginal who gets drawn into the crisis.

My only niggle is that the town the Parkers live in seems to have been cobbled together from different locations and keeps shifting in size and architectural style (it was actually shot in and around Broken Hill).  Whether that is true or not don’t let it stop you from seeing an exceptionally good Australian film and a fine one by international standards.

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