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Rabbit-Proof Fence
***1/2
Cinema Releases - November 8, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate PG. Australia.
93 minutes. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Written by Christine Olsen; from the
book by Doris Pilkington. Starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura
Monaghan, David Gulpilil, Kenneth Branagh, Ningali Lawford, Myarn
Lawford.
Once upon a time, in a chapter of history that
gets discussed less than you might think, the Australian government had a
policy of taking mixed-race Aboriginal children from their homes and sending
them to remote internment camps. They were the 'stolen generations', trained
in the way of white propriety and often then given to white families. When
did this happen? From the late 1930s to the mid-1970s.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence" opened in Australia
this February, has been playing to packed houses and inspiring much publicity
ever since, and many are feeling relief and victory about those facts even
though John Howard is probably not. The film tells the true story of three
preteen girls, played by Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan,
who were forcibly taken from their settlement in 1931. One of them, the strong
one, whose gaze into the distance never faltered and who would not let her
sisters submit, led them to escape from the place they were taken. The girls
ended up walking more than a thousand miles back home, evading pursuers and
using the long fence of the title as their only road map.
The movie opens with the children being captured,
in a scene that inspires primal reactions, as we watch these kids screaming,
protesting, reaching for their mother and clawing to break free in every
which way. When it moves on to showing the long walk home, it is blank, hot,
dry and tiring, both for the characters and for us, but it is anything but
boring. We have had such a fundamental shock at the beginning of the story
that we can feel the call of home, and there is an underlying yearning for
it in every scene. There's a grounded human core to the material coming from
Sampi, Sansbury and Monaghan -- they're traditional Aborigine girls who had
never even been to a cinema before being cast in this film, and they give
performances of unforced strength and absolute conviction.
There's also a villain, a bureaucrat played by
Kenneth Branagh who goes by the name of Neville but is known to most as 'Devil'.
The screenplay gives this character a creepy amount of depth: He is not a
cruel man, but a fatally misguided one, who thinks of himself as a visionary,
doing lesser races some good by planning to breed out their blood and make
his country white and pure. Branagh's performance is much like his work as
the SS General in the powerful TV movie "Conpiracy", where he sat at a boardroom
table and clinically detailed the Final Solution. Here, the actor is framed
from beneath, in shots of darkness that don't care how obviously they make
him look looming and sinister. The writing is a reminder that evil can come
from people who think they are doing the right thing; the filmmaking is like
a refusal to forget that the end result is wretched.
I mentioned this to the director, Phillip Noyce,
after seeing "Rabbit-Proof Fence" at this year's Telluride Film Festival.
I told him that his movie was anything but subtle, and yet he did a terrific
job with it, and by the end I was sobbing like a baby. Noyce smiled with
the recognition of a man who had been told the same thing before: His movie
is powerful not because it takes the art of drama to exquisite new forms
of exploration, but because it plays like two fingers up at a shameful chapter
in recent Antipodean times, at those responsible and at the way it has all
been forgotten, while doing respectful justice to the descendants of the
victims.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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