282. The talented indigenous Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s 11th feature film “Limbo“ (2023), based on his original screenplay: More than a crime investigation, a study on the plight of the indigenous people in Australia, and gaining significance after the recent national vote rejecting additional power for the disadvantaged community

 

 

"Limbo is the continuation of themes I explored in my previous films. Those earlier films dealt with indigenous perspective through the eyes of an indigenous police officer. Limbo explores the deeper impact of a crime on an indigenous family through the eyes of a white police officer. Some of these ideas have largely come from my own personal experience, from family members and friends.” 

--director, original screenplay-writer, music composer, editor and cinematographer Ivan Sen of Limbo

“Every single negative can lead to a positive” 

---from the Evangelist broadcast station heard on the police officer  Travis’ car radio, early in the film, after discussing the travails of the Biblical Joseph who was sold off

Australian cinema’s contribution to world cinema was phenomenal in the Seventies. It produced talented directors such as Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock; The Last Wave, etc); Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant; Getting of Wisdom, ), George Miller (Mad Max), Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career; Mrs Soffel), and Paul Cox (A Woman’s Tale: Vincent), indigenous actor David Gulpilil, cinematographer Russell Boyd and editor William Anderson (contributing to many of the aforementioned films). Unfortunately, for Australian cinema, many of them ‘migrated’ to Hollywood and are now associated with their work out there. After the glorious Seventies, there was a lull favoring more commercial cinema (e.g., Crocodile Dundee) save for occasional good cinema (e.g., Babe; Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale). In recent years, the very talented actors Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Hugo Weaving and Geoffrey Rush are rarely recognized as essentially Australians.

In this bleak scenario, a 2023 Australian film Limbo could make any discerning filmgoer sit up.  It is a crime film that provides a fascinating screenplay, mesmerizing black and white cinematography, hypnotic direction and music (used mostly towards the end, recalling the effect of Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point,  with a top-notch performance by lead actor Simon Baker (another Australian making waves in recent decades in Hollywood films The Devil Wears Prada and  L. A . Confidential).

 
Ivan Sen is an unusual name. As an Indian, I would associate “Sen” with persons from Bengal in eastern India (e.g., Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen or filmmaker Mrinal Sen). However, I was surprised to find Ivan Sen has no Indian connection. He is an indigenous Australian and had already made 10 feature films, often in color, in Australia. Even more surprising is that director Sen writes his own original scripts. In Limbo, a 20 year-old cold case is solved by a heroin-addicted Caucasian Australian police officer in a non-orthodox manner and the outcome is equally unconventional but pleasing (connecting up with the Biblical Joseph), again recalling the end of John Sayles' lovely film of the same name Limbo (1999).

Police officer Travis (Simon Baker) in casual clothes
arrives in Limbo

The unusual aspect of Sen’s Limbo is the economy of the spoken words and the emphasis on body language and lazy action, or rather inaction, which results strangely in growing trust between the indigenous folk and the white police officer that apparently never existed in the past. One of the indigenous persons, Charlie,  who the police officer Travis (Simon Baker) encounters for the first time, candidly states “I don’t talk to cops, especially white ones.”  We learn from the few conversations in the film that in the original investigation of the missing woman, indigenous witnesses were roughed up by police officers 20 years ago if they gave any information that the white police officers did not want to hear.   

Soon after Travis' arrival in Limbo his swanky car gets vandalized
while parked outside his motel and Travis has to make do
with a Sixties Dodge replacement (above) that serves him well;
reminding one of the Japanese film Drive My Car

The camera of Sen ‘speaks’ a lot. It connects visually shoe-marks near the officer’s car that has been vandalized and resulting in damaging a critical computer chip that makes the car run, and a boy, a blood relation of the missing woman being investigated, wearing two shoes that do not match. It again connects the indigenous art work inferred to have been the product of the missing person and the presence of the artwork in Leon’s dwelling. It connects the retrieval of the registration details retrieved from a missing burnt car wreck that provides possible clues to the missing girl.  In a regular Hollywood script, the details of how a police officer accesses and reconfirms by talking to colleagues or checking old data are concepts thrown out of the window by Ivan Sen.   He expects the viewer to be smart enough to connect the images and the brief spoken words subsequently. That is mature cinema and a more realistic approach to detective work than mere spoon-feeding of details in the typical Hollywood noir fare. 

Questions from the police officer Travis elicit icy responses

Equally confounding, initially are the words spoken by Charlie to the suspect Leon’s dog (in a local indigenous language, used infrequently in the film, the rest being English). The dog understands what is said but not the viewer. I guess the director wants the viewer to turn detective and connect that the dog knows Charlie, the brother of the victim, while the initial suspect Leon, now dead, owned the dog and is now cared for by Joseph, Leon’s buddy . It is typical of the filmmaking method of Ivan Sen, evident throughout the film. Joseph’s character can be fleshed out in an unconventional manner (by an attentive viewer) by connecting the dots: his concern for the dog, the flowers regularly placed at the last known location of the missing person, Joseph in the small church speaking to the priest, Joseph’s condolences 20 years late to the missing person’s family, etc.

 

Travis persists and wins over the key persons
related to the cold case

Limbo is unusual because it presents a police officer who is a heroin addict and yet solves the case with persistence. We realize the man had gone undercover with a body full of tattoos to bust a drug traffic case and got addicted in the process. Yet he can still do his job—and how! His addiction could also have been because his wife has left him for another man and his son with her. He quietly steps out of that cosmos to help another family come together, even though when requested initially to help the fractured family he feels he is not qualified for that specific intervention.

 

Indigenous residents, including children, survive by
scrounging for opal stones in the soil near the old opal mines

 Ariel view of the unused opal mines in South Australia in twilight

Beyond the ‘outback’ noir, the film uses spirituality. First, there are the radio broadcasts that Travis listens to in the car. Then there is a seemingly unconnected visit by Travis to the Limbo church where he observes Joseph and the priest from a distance. You don’t hear the spoken words, you “see” the body language. Most importantly, the film like the Joseph story in the Bible reunites a family thanks to the police officer’s kind intervention.  The viewer is seemingly urged by the director to superimpose the Biblical tale of Joseph on Travis’ difficulty in solving the crime as much as the missing girl’s family’s defeatist feeling that they will never get justice or closure in the social and physical wasteland of Coober Pedy in South Australia, where once opal stone was mined commercially.  It is still sparsely inhabited with a few police cars, a church, a few pubs and diners, an opal trader, and an automobile technician who needs to order spare parts from a distant town to get them. 

 

Entry to one of the opal caves, exterior view, with Travis's car
parked outside

Metaphoric entry of Travis into the caves of Limbo,
dug to mine opal stones, to crack the cold case
he is investigating

Add all this cinematic craft of Sen to the breath-taking aerial view of the deserted man-made opal cave mines that still have some opal in the rubble with Sen’s own music. Further, the decision that Sen made to film Limbo in black-and-white was astute—a departure from his earlier work Mystery Road. It all works. Congratulations, Mr Ivan Sen, you are lifting up a sagging Australian cinema cherry picking fine cinematic concepts from world cinema and adapting those to benefit a better global understanding of the indigenous community. The funding for the film is well-conceptualized: Limbo will possibly attract tourism to the South Australian outback with opal to pick up if you have a keen eye, just as some parks near former gold-mining hotspots in USA do reward visitors with keen eyes who spot gold nuggets.       

P.S. Limbo won the Grand Prize at the 2023 Brussels International Film festival. It was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 2023 Berlin Film festival. It is one of best films of 2023 for this critic. Ivan Sen’s work in this film reminds you of the late Ermanno Olmi, whose Golden Palm winning film The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) was also directed, written, edited, and cinematographed by Olmi himself. Sen goes one step further than Olmi—he contributes the music of his own film as well! Another Australian film that took an empathetic view of the indigenous people was Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977). Reviews of the two films by this author, published on this blog, mentioned earlier in this postscript can be accessed by clicking on their colored titles here. 

103. Australian director Peter Weir’s Australian film “The Last Wave” (Black Rain) (1977): Australian cinema at its best, connecting dreams and reality

Today, many filmgoers associate Peter Weir with his touching US movie Dead Poets’s Society. I, too, love Dead Poet’s Society for the message it conveys to its audiences and for the charming performances of its actors. But if the evaluation is based on the quality of the cinema, I would rate Weir’s earlier film The Last Wave, a film he made in his native Australia, to be intrinsically far superior.

There are several reasons why I consider Weir’s The Last Wave to stand out amongst Weir’s interesting and rich cinematic works.

First, unlike his more talked about films Dead Poet’s Society, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Cars that Ate Paris, all of which are either based on actual events and characters, or works of novelists, Weir’s The Last Wave is an intensely original personal story, conceptualized and developed by the director himself. It is inconsequential that the end of the film is left open-ended and is difficult to comprehend for many who prefer finite endings for movies. But then which parts of our life are fully finite and understood? In a fascinating interview available on the internet with the director, Ms Judith Kass reveals that Weir’s idea to make the film was initiated by an indefinable sudden urge to dig up a buried ancient statue of a child in Tunisia, after stumbling on another piece of the statue above ground, while on a holiday in that country. This incident led Weir to develop the story of this thought-provoking movie. For those who believe in spiritual coincidences, could there be a better reality tale?

Second, this is a rare attempt in the annals of Australian cinema to truly understand the Aboriginal inhabitant’s mind, values, and sacred beliefs with part sanction and approval from the Aboriginals themselves.

Third, some of the actors in the film were not “acting” in the true sense—they were portraying characters they had decided for themselves after they were satisfied with Weir’s script. In fact, a real life Aboriginal and tribal magistrate Nandjiwarra Amagula ‘plays’ the role of “Charlie” in the film, after incorporating his and other Aboriginals’ views on the development of that character. For Nandjiwarra Amagula, this was his sole movie appearance.

Most of all I love my favorite line in the film “Our dreams are shadows of something real.” And this is not Sigmund Freud, but the words of the original scriptwriters of the film—Peter Weir, Tony Morphett and Petru Popescu.

The film is essentially just that. It sways between dreams and reality. It toys with subconscious memories, rebirths, ancestral faiths, and relationships with natural calamities.

For Weir, the plot of the film balances the virtues of material wealth of modern Western society with the spiritual wealth of Aboriginals of Australia. It is also a tale of nature doing unusual things, when rain is not clean water but a dark liquid, when wind and rain can make you squirm with fear within the safety of your home and when you feel they are speaking to you, when waves from the sea can appear to be like a tsunami, literally or figuratively speaking. The Aboriginals seem to to know more about the strange natural phenomena than the richer and more educated European Australians. It is also a tale of how modern Australia has built cities such as Sydney over traditional Aboriginal land with artifacts and totems that may still be holy and sacred to the tribes that once ruled the land. And these artifacts could be truly buried under the sewers and waste outlets of modern cities.

The Last Wave is an inquiry into one’s subconscious as well. It is definitely not a thriller or even a horror film. The lead character David Burton (a decent performance by American actor Richard Chamberlain) of the movie is an Australian lawyer, who is supposed to have a South American lineage. He is defending an Aboriginal accused in a murder of another. He experiences strange dreams and feels he has an unidentifiable "connection" to one of the accused in the case. The Aboriginals in turn identify him to be a “mukurul from across the sea.” Weir develops the connection further as the plot progresses, as the character David shows a distinct affinity and curiosity for the Aboriginals. The same Aboriginals frighten David’s wife, while they mean no harm. As David encounters Charlie the Aboriginal to ask him why he had come outside his home and frightened his wife on a rainy night, and asks him “Who are you?” Charlie’s enigmatic response is “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Are you a fish? Are you a snake? Are you a man? Who are you?” An existential conundrum indeed, probably partly resolved when David picks up an aboriginal “mask” figuratively and literally, much later towards the end of the movie.

Weir achieves a rare feat in cinema as the film empathizes with the unknown instead of tending to rationalize the odd facts presented in the script. When I saw the film, some 30 years ago, it provided a great introduction to the emerging and throughly awesome Australian cinema of the Seventies. When I view the same film today I get the feeling of reassurance that Weir had somehow grasped the uncanny problem of vagaries of nature relating to water that Australians increasingly face as they wait for cloud bearing storms to survive the ever increasing water shortage on the continent. That he was not able connect this to the main tale adequately is unfortunate. Can Australia afford to forget the spiritual wealth of the original inhabitants of that continent as they grapple with nature’s vagaries even to this day?

Critics have pointed out that Weir was at a loss to close the tale and the apocalyptic end was not in the original script. If you reflect on the final scene of the film one could say that Weir truly couldn’t have ended the tale any better. It is a film that will make the viewer question many facts, dreams, and the freaky behaviors of nature. It need not be Australia-centric but has relevance to parallel global values.

Kudos for this nugget of cinema need to go not just to Weir, but to a host of other gifted Australians: cinematographer Russell Boyd, actor David Gulpilil, composer Charles Wain, and Oscar winning cameraman John Seale (obviously an apprentice in this film).



My appreciation of the film increased after reading Peter Weir’s interview with Judith M. Kass available at http://www.peterweircave.com/articles/articlei.html But the best lines in the interview are the following.

Judith Kass: What would you like your audiences to know about your films?

Peter Weir: I remember a quote of Bruce Springsteen's in Rolling Stone. He said, "I like to give my audiences something money can't buy." So I'd like them to walk out with much more than the $4.00 or whatever it cost.

If you have seen the movie, reflect on the importance of the original title of the film The Last Wave and perhaps you will get more value than $4! The Last Wave won the Golden Ibex (the Grand Prize) at the Teheran International Film Festival, 1977.

76. Australian director Lian Lunson’s charming documentary “Leonard Cohen: I am Your Man” (2005) (USA): The singer, not just the song

I confess to be a die hard fan of Leonard Cohen, Canada’s Bob Dylan, poet, novelist, ladies man, thinker and singer. He is alive and 74 years young while a new generation vibes to the music of Shrek (2001) without much of a clue to the tiered meanings of the Cohen song Hallelujah sung in the film or who wrote it.

In the early Seventies, during my college years, I became his fan when I was introduced to Cohen’s poetry and music captured by the Robert Altman film McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). Decades later Cohen continues to be globally adored by musicians, women and fans in equal measure. It is not surprising therefore that Australian actor/director Mel Gibson helped co-produce this charming documentary directed by a young lady Ms Lian Lunson, a film in which musicians like Bono lavish praises on this man with a “golden voice.”

For those who have not heard the original Cohen renditions—beware, the film has only two songs sung by Cohen himself—one during the credits and one towards the end with Bono. The rest of the songs sung in the film are free-wheeling interpretations of Cohen’s songs by other singers, all Cohen’s fans themselves, which are not comparable to the magnetism exuded by the original rendering by Cohen.

Predictably the director Ms Lian Lunson faced brickbats from Leonard Cohen fans who expected the old man himself to sing his own songs—not realizing that his voice has aged though not like fine wine. However, Ms Lunson won the Dorothy Arzner Directors Award at the 2006 Women in Film Crystal Awards for this film. (For those who have not heard of Arzner, she was one of the first women to direct films in Hollywood.) The film is a combination of songs and interviews but what makes the film a delight is the mature editing, which will perhaps be lost on viewers not paying adequate attention to the words of the songs. Ultimately the film is less about the songs and more about the man as the title of the film suggests. (I am your man is, of course, one of the titles of a popular song he wrote and sang.)

Now why would a documentary film of this nature be remarkable? A part of the film’s inherent strength comes from Cohen’s learned inward-looking observations captured by the fine interview/monologues. My favorite one in the film was Cohen, a Jew and later a Buddhist monk (for a short while) stating “There is a beautiful moment in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna, the general. The great general. He's standing in his chariot. And all the chariots are readied for war. And across the valley, he sees his opponents. And there he sees not just uncles and aunts and cousins, he sees gurus, he sees teachers that have taught him; and you know how the Indians revere that relationship. He sees them. And Krishna, one of the expressions of the deity, says to him, "you'll never untangle the circumstances that brought you to this moment. You're a warrior. Arise now, mighty warrior. With the full understanding, that they've already been killed, and so have you. This is just a play. This is my will. You're caught up in the circumstances that I determine for you. That you did not determine for yourself. So, arise, you're a noble warrior. Embrace your destiny, your fate, and stand up and do your duty."

Who is the real Leonard Cohen? The documentary opens the viewer’s eyes by following this conversation to his famous song “If it be your will” sung by Antony Hegarty:

“If it be Your Will
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing.”
The Arjuna and Cohen parallels make the song even more interesting than it would have been otherwise.

The sensitive view-points of Leonard Cohen, the metaphysical thinker, can be glimpsed in the film where another of his songs is sung:

“Ah the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold and bought again
the dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in”
which is followed by his spoken comment: “Sometimes, when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise... somehow we're, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it's perfectible, that you're going to get it all straight. I've found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”

Ms Lunson, the director of the film, would cut from the middle of a song to a shot of Cohen peering nostalgically with an enigmatic wry smile between red bead curtains while the song continues

“I was born like this
I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song”

Some viewers would be annoyed but this is a thinking person’s documentary to be enjoyed keeping in perspective the mental state of the man who wrote that string of words while jostling with likes of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and a host of off-beat intellectuals of the Sixties and Seventies. At that time his poetry was more important for him than his music. Here’s a film that can be enjoyed to glimpse the thoughts of a great talented mind gifted with a golden voice that could barely “carry a tune” by his own admission. Here's a film where Cohen's enigmatic wry smile says a thousand words. Here’s a film that can be enjoyed beyond the songs even though my favorite Cohen song Democracy is not included in the Lunson film which I viewed as Barack Obama won his Presidential race. The words of the Cohen song Democracy seem to be hauntingly appropriate for the historical moment:

"It ain’t coming to us European style:
Concentration camp behind a smile.
It ain’t coming from the east,
With its temporary feast,
As Count Dracula comes
Strolling down the aisle...
Democracy is coming to USA."

"First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues.
This gutter people always in the news,
But who really gets to laugh behind the black man’s back
When he makes his little crack about the Jews?
Who really gets to profit and who really gets to pay?
Who really rides the slavery ship right into Charleston Bay?
Democracy is coming to the U.S. A. "

It would not be fair to criticize Ms Lunson for leaving out any Cohen song as she was essentially filming a concert in Australia (the Gibson connection?) devoted to Cohen’s music and editing (Mike Cahill) that footage into her Cohen interview. What this documentary reveals is the power of juxtaposing connected filmed materials, switching from color to black-and-white with felicity, where the total effect exceeded the sum of the film’s parts symbiotically. Ms Lunson deserved her award as she captured the brilliance and the humility of Cohen the man leaping over the lilt of the rendition of his songs.