***possible spoilers***
A movie so well conceived and executed that, like a Tarkovsky film (I'm not kidding), the story acts merely as a quiet vehicle for more important and more powerful things - barely expressed but wrenchingly felt emotions, the inescapable clutch of landscape and fleeting moments of profound beauty and joy within a life of violence, humiliation and despair.
Beneath Clouds reminds me very much of an SBS TV doco also directed by Ivan Sen called Shifting Shelter, in which a small number of Aboriginal Australian youths are interviewed twice across a period of a year or two. That too was quiet but affecting, and seemed to point to the inevitability in life among the least affluent of the Aboriginal communities across rural Australia.
Who knows? Maybe it's Sen's own background that allows potential road movie and Aborigine cliches to come off fresh and convincing. Supporting actors with the smallest parts to play come off convincingly as separate characters rather than fodder for the narrative, something that few directors seem to value - Martin Brest being an exception. I suspect too that there's a whole bunch of stuff that only Aboriginal viewers will recognise.
Scenes to treasure - (1) the mute, elderly Aboriginal woman in the back of the car who is the *only* character in the film to correctly identify the heroine as Aboriginal (in her only line of dialogue), who shudders at the sight of the killing mountain, and who, apparently out of sheer experience, neither moves nor speaks as her relations are assaulted by police.
(2) Arthur Dignam, that wonderful actor, in an austere cameo as the one white person (rural gentry? urban middle class retiree?) who lends a hand to the fleeing couple, no questions asked.
(3) Having established a bond, the two leads, each and alone, looking into the eyes of animals they encounter, distracting them just long enough from their predicament to sense something beyond what imprisons them. When they first start their trek the animals they see instead are roadkill.
The casting is outstanding; the last movie like this to use amateurs so effectively was probably Pixote.
Beneath Clouds doesn't have the sexy tagline or superhuman behaviour of a film like Rabbit Proof Fence. It offers only the smallest glimmer of hope in the face of overwhelming circumstances. But it makes total sense and punches deep inside. If Ivan Sen can make a better feature film than this then Australia can only rejoice.
A movie so well conceived and executed that, like a Tarkovsky film (I'm not kidding), the story acts merely as a quiet vehicle for more important and more powerful things - barely expressed but wrenchingly felt emotions, the inescapable clutch of landscape and fleeting moments of profound beauty and joy within a life of violence, humiliation and despair.
Beneath Clouds reminds me very much of an SBS TV doco also directed by Ivan Sen called Shifting Shelter, in which a small number of Aboriginal Australian youths are interviewed twice across a period of a year or two. That too was quiet but affecting, and seemed to point to the inevitability in life among the least affluent of the Aboriginal communities across rural Australia.
Who knows? Maybe it's Sen's own background that allows potential road movie and Aborigine cliches to come off fresh and convincing. Supporting actors with the smallest parts to play come off convincingly as separate characters rather than fodder for the narrative, something that few directors seem to value - Martin Brest being an exception. I suspect too that there's a whole bunch of stuff that only Aboriginal viewers will recognise.
Scenes to treasure - (1) the mute, elderly Aboriginal woman in the back of the car who is the *only* character in the film to correctly identify the heroine as Aboriginal (in her only line of dialogue), who shudders at the sight of the killing mountain, and who, apparently out of sheer experience, neither moves nor speaks as her relations are assaulted by police.
(2) Arthur Dignam, that wonderful actor, in an austere cameo as the one white person (rural gentry? urban middle class retiree?) who lends a hand to the fleeing couple, no questions asked.
(3) Having established a bond, the two leads, each and alone, looking into the eyes of animals they encounter, distracting them just long enough from their predicament to sense something beyond what imprisons them. When they first start their trek the animals they see instead are roadkill.
The casting is outstanding; the last movie like this to use amateurs so effectively was probably Pixote.
Beneath Clouds doesn't have the sexy tagline or superhuman behaviour of a film like Rabbit Proof Fence. It offers only the smallest glimmer of hope in the face of overwhelming circumstances. But it makes total sense and punches deep inside. If Ivan Sen can make a better feature film than this then Australia can only rejoice.