BY PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * * )
Intimate, grim and sometimes bleakly comic, the newest film by Australian documentary maker Dennis O'Rourke is the result of nine months spent in the town of the title, 800km west of Brisbane.
O'Rourke, who made The Good Woman of Bangkok and the nuclear parable Half Life, sifts through the town's 1500 souls to find his cast of "characters" (10 major, five bit players) with no attempt to pretend they are representative. Indeed he avoids the obvious targets and town luminaries and fashions a portrait of fringe dwellers who are at once unremarkable and remarkably engaging.
In leading roles are the town's taciturn cabbie, Arthur, and his wife, Neredah, who has a voice like 10 miles of dirt road and believes in beating wayward teenagers with fence palings ("Go hard! Go hard!" she proudly recalls bellowing to a neighbour who was doing just that). This couple, she irrepressibly voluble, he so laconic that we need the subtitles O'Rourke has thoughtfully supplied, act as a sort of malevolent Greek chorus as we watch lives of silent desperation unfold on screen.
The investment of time allows O'Rourke to achieve an intimacy which recalls the work of his compatriots Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly, who made the extraordinary Rats In The Ranks. As an 18-year-old Aboriginal boy talks offhandedly about his imminent first prison term, we realise it's the first of many. Teenagers Cara and Kellie-Anne hope that at least one of the town's sexually predatory boys will one day be a friend.
O'Rourke wanted to explore in his anatomy of a town the way that black and white rubbed shoulders but he doesn't look for the stark and simple signs. As we watch Jack - the son of an Aboriginal mother and Afghani father, he calls the local Aborigines "them" - sitting by the fan and lamenting that his adoptive white son, who identifies as Aboriginal, will never amount to anything, we get some sense of the complexity of a world which documentary makers so often seek to reduce to easily chewed platitudes.
O'Rourke courts controversy with Cunnamulla; the teenage girls - one of whom has filed a lawsuit against him for humiliation caused - will doubtless live to regret that their casual promiscuity is part of the documentary record and it's hard to claim that he implicates himself with quite the same unflinching honesty as he showed in the unjustly maligned The Good Woman of Bangkok.
But it's an intelligent and engrossing piece of filmmaking whose return to general release after festival screenings deserves wide support.
Director: Dennis O'Rourke
Running time: 86 mins
Rating: M, offensive language, sexual references
Screening: Opens Thursday, Academy
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