Dir. Ray Lawrence, Australia, 2007, 123 mins
Cast: Laura Linney, Gabriel Byrne, Deborrah-Lee Furness, John Howard
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Four men on a fishing trip in the mountains near the Australian town of Jindabyne find the body of a murdered Aboriginal woman floating in the river. Jindabyne focuses on with how the men deal with their discovery and the subsequent reaction of their partners, families and neighbours through exploring Stewart (Byrne) and Claire’s (Linney) struggling marriage.
Jindabyne is based on a Raymond Carver short story, 'So Much Water, So Close to Home', also used in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Ray Lawrence previously directed the excellent Lantana, an effective, brooding tale of the nuances of suspicion and deceit. Jindabyne is no less powerful than the earlier film and also uses a crisis to explore how people cope with huge pressure on the fragile relationships Carver describes.
Claire cannot comprehend Stewart’s actions and struggles to rebuild her image of him, protesting: ‘I want my husband to be a good man’. She tries to blot out his misdeeds by seeking forgiveness from the woman’s family. Her efforts are exposed when she visits them to give them money for the funeral: ‘It’s not charity’, she protests. ‘You buying something then?’ asks the woman’s relative acidly. Meanwhile, Stewart remembers and resents Claire’s post-natal abandonment of her baby son, Tom. Lawrence is expert at demonstrating the daily small revenges of faltering trust, like Stewart’s helpless shrug of shared misogyny towards two men who call Claire ‘bitch’ because of her emotional behaviour or Claire’s insistence that Stewart is indifferent to the woman’s death.
The town judges the men’s behaviour as horrific. But we are shown something different, something understandable and at worst ambiguous, especially when considered with the community’s marked racism and sexism. Divorced from their context, the film seems to ask, how can we understand anyone’s actions? This speculation reaches its apotheosis in a scene where Tom’s damaged and morbid friend, Caylin-Calandria, apparently watches him as he nearly drowns but then congratulates him on managing to swim – was she waiting to watch him die or challenging him to survive?
As in Lantana, Lawrence builds an atmosphere of eery suspense around the everyday. Everything becomes strange and untrustworthy – the buzzing of power lines grows frighteningly insistent, the battering of a wasp against a car window is suddenly desperate and Claire’s swim in a lake, watched by Tom, seems to presage her drowning and his helpless witnessing of the death.
But the blank, beautiful Australian landscape also gives release from the oppression of this latent violence. Claire is pursued by the murderer and after he drives away gets out of her car and stands gazing into the rustling trees by the road. The shot is held long enough for our horror-movie conditioned responses (‘get back in the car!’) to subside and for a calm acceptance of her isolation to wash over us. These moments make up a stunning film which, instead of providing exhaustive exposition and motivation for all their actions, gives its characters space to be untidy and sometimes unsettling in their mystery.
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