It’s been a while since I reviewed a Christmas movie on Down Under Flix. Though billed a Stan ‘Original’, Christiaan Van Vuuren’s A Sunburnt Christmas (2020)—about an escaped convict who poses as Santa Clause and takes refuge on a farm teetering on foreclosure—is pretty boilerplate, sharing DNA with Christmas movies previously discussed here on DUF. Like Bush Christmas, it partners crooks and kids with both vested and mutual interests in an outback setting; like Crackers, characterization and performance are delivered in broad, splashy brush strokes. While the film isn’t a slog, and features likeable work from the talented Daniel Henshall and Tatiana Goode, there’s nothing special about this seasonal offering.
While I suspect A Sunburnt Christmas will contract on repeat viewings, Henri Safran’s Storm Boy (1976)—for this viewer at least—only expands with each subsequent watch. With age, Greg Rowe’s deceptively simple performance becomes richer, Peter Cummins’ deceptively inexpressive work becomes more expressive, and David Gulpilil’s deceptively enigmatic turn reveals more vulnerability. The inherent goofiness and adorability of pelican star Mr. Percival adds considerable production value, surpassed perhaps only by the beauty of the Coorong region, exquisitely shot by Geoff Burton. While some of its creakier moments belie its vintage, most stills could be One Perfect Shot contenders and not look out of place on a gallery wall. Kriv Stenders tried to capture some of Storm Boy’s magic in Red Dog: True Blue, while Shawn Seet remade it in 2018, but these filmmakers added too much mustard to the dish. Both in spite of and because of its simplicity and its gentle and grounded approach, Safran’s film remains as universal and meaningful a Bildungsroman as Star Wars.
While Storm Boy emerged from an era of Australian cinema that frequently romanticized national heritage while gesturing to its dark undercurrents, national self-disgust is the coin of the realm of much current historical Australian cinema. Consistent with this trend is Stephen Johnson’s High Ground (2020), which opens with an unflinching depiction of the massacre of a group of Yolngu Aboriginals on Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. The lone survivor, a young boy named Gutjuk, is taken by sniper Travis (Simon Baker) to live on a mission. Twelve years later, when Gutjuk’s uncle Baywara stages attacks against European settlers, Travis and the adult Gutjuk (Jacob Junior Nayinggul) are tasked with tracking him down.
High Ground grapples intelligently with themes of violence begetting violence, the clash of European and Indigenous law, and the question of who morally inhabits high ground and on what basis. The film is an accomplished work, with especially praiseworthy, unsettling editing by Karryn de Cinque, Hayley Miro Browne, and veteran Jill Bilcock, and uniformly good casting including Jack Thompson, Aaron Pedersen, and Caren Pistorius. I examined Johnson’s previous film Yolngu Boy in the first year of DUF, and my review noted that "Yolngu Boy’s visual style is wired and caffeinated, with fast edits and lively, somewhat Sam Raimi-esque camera moves". In contrast to this emphatic sizzle, High Ground is all steak, sitting assuredly alongside The Tracker and Rabbit-Proof Fence as one of the finest works from non-Indigenous filmmakers dramatizing traumas visited upon Indigenous Australians.
Ben