Strangers in splendid isolation

By PETER CALDER

Among the many striking images that litter the new Australian film Japanese Story, one stands out. Early in the movie a Japanese tourist, Tachibana Hiromitsu (played by Gotaro Tsunashima), stops on a stretch of desert highway, sets his Leica on the roof of his rental car and starts the self-timer. He scurries a few metres off the road and stands, straight, stiff and unsmiling, as he waits for the click.

That incongruous image was what first fired the imagination of the film's writer, Alison Tilson. An executive of Film Australia had suggested to her the idea of a film about a Japanese man and an Australian woman that could explore the many tensions that such a relationship might ignite.

"I just had this amazing vision of a Japanese guy driving alone through the desert," she told Tilson. "Just imagine - you'd be wondering why he was there and what he was doing."

"I was so struck by this fabulous image that I changed my mind," Tilson said.

We should be glad she did. The film she wrote, which won eight Australian film awards - including best picture - in November, is a startlingly original piece of work which deserves a wider audience than it is likely to get.

It was directed by Sue Brooks, whose last collaboration with Tilson was on the hilarious, affectionate and charming Road to Nhill in 1997. But the two films have almost nothing in common apart from both being set off the beaten track.

In Japanese Story, the landscape - the red desert of the Pilbara in northern Western Australia - is the third character. Hiromitsu and Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette), a prickly geologist who is his reluctant guide, journey deep into the hot and dusty heartland and discover much more than they expected.

Brooks, who was in Auckland over the summer, teaching at a screenwriting workshop organised by the New Zealand Writers Foundation, said the film addressed white Australians' problematic relationship - an attitude which is a mixture of awe and loathing - with their hinterland, an idea that has driven dozens of films from Wake In Fright to the Mad Max series.

"We're obsessed about it, aren't we?" says Brooks, before citing half a dozen New Zealand films which reflect our fearful obsession with the bush.

It's a comparison that can only go so far; in remote Australia people die - "lots of people, all the time" as Sandy remarks - and there are animals that kill and even eat the unwary. But the point remains that in what people in both countries call the bush, characters can be pushed to extremes for dramatic effect.

"We wanted to put them somewhere where they would be forced to look at each other and the desert is the place where everything else you have can go - your mobile phone can go flat, your car can die - and you only have each other."

There's nothing new about that idea but, as its title suggests, Japanese Story is also about the cultural divide between Australia and the country to the north which once sought to invade it.

"It's a very complex relationship," she says. "Nearly 60 years after 1945 it's still within spitting distance ... and to go to Pearl Harbor [the former POW camp at] Changi, it's fascinating. There's a lot of pain still there."

These two ideas underpin a film which is also impressive as an eerie love story which is anything but predictable. It has an abrupt and stunning plot twist which drags the film off in an utterly unexpected direction.

The first film to be shot in the Pilbara, it was a challenging logistical undertaking. An eight-week shoot in blistering heat required cast and crew to live in air-conditioned shipping containers behind a remote petrol station.

Brooks had considered shooting in South Australia but kept hearing of other, projects such as Tracker and Rabbit-Proof Fence which had filmed in every location she looked at. "I kept wondering how I could make this look different and so we went for the Pilbara because it's virgin territory and it's beautiful country."

That other-worldly beauty is on show from the title sequence as the camera surveys the setting from above and the white desert flowers in the terracotta sand.

"It was a challenge, all right," says Brooks. "We drove four hours from our base just to get one shot. The producer got a bit toey about that."

The nearness of the Outback meant it would have been technically possible to shoot on the edge of suburbia simply by facing inland but Brooks says it would not have worked at the all-important emotional level. "It was a matter of trying to create a feeling in the actors," she says. "I'm not naive. I know you can cheat in film but the isolation was a sort of magic and I wanted that magic."

On screen

* Who: Sue Brooks, director

* What: Japanese Story

* When and where: Now showing at Rialto and Bridgeway cinemas