Director: Ivan Sen
Actors: Danielle Hall, Damian Pitt
Ivan
Sen’s latest film Goldstone premiered
at the Sydney Film Festival earlier this month and is due for
wider release in July, making this a good time to check out his debut
feature, 2002’s Beneath
Clouds. Sen won Best Director at that year’s Australian Film
Institute Awards, in what proved a significant year for Indigenous-themed
films: on top of Sen’s Best Director win, Best Film went to Phillip
Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof
Fence and Best Actor went to David Gulpilil for The Tracker, and all three
films were nominated and/or won in multiple categories.
Beneath
Clouds follows
two young Indigenous teenagers hitch-hiking to Sydney through rural New South
Wales. Lena (Danielle Hall) is the daughter of an absent Irish father and a
negligent mother. Vaughan (Damian Pitt) is a juvenile delinquent working on a
prison farm who finds out his mother is ill. Both characters resolve to escape
their prisons – literal in Vaughan’s case and small time life in Lena’s – and
set off to Sydney, Lena to see her father and Vaughan to visit his ailing
mother. They meet on the road and end up travelling side by side. Initially
cynical of each other and verbally combative, they form a strong bond as their
journey progresses.
Beneath
Clouds is
a study of contrasts and opposites. Nowhere is this more evident than the
contrast between the often beautiful scenery and landscapes of the Wiradjuri
and Gamilaroi regions where the film was shot and the often severe,
disadvantaged lives endured by those who inhabit these regions. Throughout the
film Sen depicts the institutionalised racism facing Indigenous
Australians from both the authorities and members of the general populace. He
also shows the limited opportunities afforded young Indigenous Australians, and
the resulting friction in that community between young and old, and men and
women.
As
befitting a road movie (albeit a road movie on foot), there is a sense of
constant motion: even when there is stillness and silence, there is the
underlying compulsion to move forward. This manifests in the spartan dialogue
between the two protagonists, shorn of superfluous niceties: Lena and Vaughan
speak to each other in jabs and digs, none of them wasted, all conveying
essential character-building information. This economical storytelling extends
beyond the dialogue: the silences between them speak volumes, and while there’s
little eye contact between these characters as they journey side by side, their
glances and moments of eye contact are meaningful. There is an element of
silent film acting and silent film grammar to this economy, and while it isn’t
always particularly naturalistic, it somehow feels authentic.
Much
of this accomplishment rests on the shoulders of Hall and Pitt, who deliver
strong performances. Alternately taciturn and abrasive, hardened and coarse,
and wounded and sympathetic, Lena and Vaughan are roles that could have
appealed to histrionic acting instincts, but there’s an understated,
naturalistic flatness to the performances and delivery, which gives those key
emotional beats even more charge when they arise. Both are pained, often
cynical characters: Lena is resigned, weary, but yearning for a better life,
while Vaughan’s yearning has eroded and his resignation turned to anger. The
actors convey this nicely – Hall suitably laconic, Pitt knotted and simmering –
and their eventual reconciling of perspectives and mutual understanding is a
beautiful thing. Alas, this would be both performers’ first and last roles, and
Pitt sadly died in a car accident in 2009. The film is thus lightning in a
bottle, enshrining the work of two novices with tremendous raw potential.
Beneath Clouds is an important, melancholic but ultimately optimistic
and hopeful film, elevated by economical, silent film-esque storytelling and
two very fine performances.
Ben Kooyman