The Nun and the Bandit

The title of this film suggests a bad American '80s caper movie but it is in fact by Australia's best known auteur, Paul Cox, and based on a 1935 novel of the same name by an English author, Grant Watson, who wrote in the Laurentian manner a number of novels based on his two year sojourn in Australia.

Looking very much like the historical dramas typifying Australian '70s film, the only version I have seen of this was on commercial television and cut with advertisements but even so it looked clumsily made and more importantly, did not appear to hang together. Most performances, with the exception of Chris Hayward's, are amateurish but the principal problem is that the main premise of the story, a revenge kidnapping, is merely the context for an unconvincing exercise in spiritual crisis. This is Cox's home turf (and a common theme in Australian bush films) but here it jars, being unmotivated within the context of what we see and displacing other elements of the narrative, such as the other characters, who simply obligingly evaporate, whilst the issues it explore are insufficiently explored and glibly resolved.

 

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