Limbo

dir: Ivan Sen

2023

Limbo. Doesn’t mean much to non-Christian types, as a concept or a ‘place’. Doesn’t mean much to most people, I think.

I think most of us just think of it as being an in-between place. Maybe a place you’re trapped in, maybe forever, maybe not.

Veteran indigenous director Ivan Sen wrote, directed and lensed this flick, and he set it in a fictional town call Limbo. It’s really Coober Pedy, in South Australia (Umoona, in Kokotha language), between Adelaide and Alice Springs, but it might as well be on the surface of the moon, considering how alien it looks in this film.

Travis Hurley (Australia’s Own Simon Baker) is a detective, who for whatever reason has been dispatched on assignment to Limbo in order to go over old information about the twenty year ago disappearance of an indigenous girl called Charlotte. He’s not reopening a cold case: there’s a chance they’re going to reopen it, but they might not. He’s in town driving around chatting tersely with the locals about what happened all those years ago.

No-one wants to talk to him, no-one has any real leads, the only legit suspect from back in the day is dead, the girl’s family don’t want to have a bar of it, so Travis gets nowhere quickly, and resolves to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Until he can’t. He’s trapped too, you see. Sure, it’s for technological reasons (someone trying to steal his car fucks up its onboard computer, which will take several days to replace). Helpfully, the mechanic loans him a cool older car, a Dodge Chrysler, which looks far cooler than the work car when Travis is tooling around Limbo.

Black, long classic car, against a white landscape. Did I neglect to mention that the flick is filmed in black and white? It somehow manages to make Coober Pedy / Limbo look even more alien and inhospitable. It looks more like a set they could use to stand in for Tatooine. Travis’s accommodation, at the appropriately named Limbo Hotel, is carved out of sandstone. Underground. A lot of people, not all, live and work underground, in these caves that are meant to recall various Biblical themes: Sepulchers, tombs, ancient chuches.

Charlotte’s family are trapped too, and have been since the disappearance. Her siblings Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) were taken away from their mum after, on the pretext that Charlotte’s disappearance was as a result of bad parenting, which fractured them in different ways, leading to their mum’s death. Charlie lives in a caravan, avoiding the three kids being looked after by his sister, having never recovered from losing Charlotte, from being accused by the cops for her disappearance.

We wonder what Travis’ interest is in solving this crime. Well, we wonder until we watch him repeatedly shoot up heroin, and then we don’t wonder that much anymore. Travis himself is covered in mostly crude tattoos as well, and as he alludes to later on, his time undercover in the drug squad left him permanently marked by his experiences. Clearly his superiors don’t know about his heroin addiction, but this doesn’t look like a plum assignment either, so maybe he’s given dead-end scutt-work deliberately.

For the first third of the film neither Chris nor Emma want to answer any of Travis’ questions, either because they know it won’t change anything, or because they fear further repercussions from the local cops. It’s clear that twenty years ago they all suffered at the hands of callous pigs who didn’t give a fuck about Charlotte or any other indigenous kids that might have gone missing.

Gee, I wonder if racism has anything to do with anything. It’s not just the targeted racism (of not putting much effort into finding her, alive or dead) against any other indigenous suspects, including her own family, or the non-pursuit of a likely “Anglo” suspect notorious for his activities in the town; it’s the use of government policy, arising from such bullshit as the “Intervention”, or “Closing the Gap” to actively make these people’s lives worse.

There’s also the threat to lynch Chris, on tape, during a record of interview, which is chilling in how casually it’s done, and how it never resulted in any repercussions for the cops.

Travis’s approach throughout is one of dogged, disinterested determination. He turns up somewhere, asks some questions, goes away when people tell him to go away, does some heroin, listens to tapes of interviews, then sleeps. This is a significant departure from the usual detective crime drama that reaches our screens, either in tv or film form. There are no brilliant feats of deduction, no tiny details that sparks a cascade of revelations, no brilliant yet evil antagonist to match wits with.

It’s just as slow crawl through obvious bits of information until a clearer picture is drawn.

And even then… it’s not so clear.

It’s a far cry from the seven seasons the same actor played the character of Patrick Jane in The Mentalist. For one thing, Patrick Jane rarely if ever used needle drugs. For another, he had a whole crew of hangers-on to marvel at how brilliant his every tenuous deduction was.

There’s no-one to applaud him here, and it’s not even clear that he’s ever going to get anywhere. No-one really knows anything that substantial, and even when Travis figures out people have lied about particular aspects, it doesn’t prove anything more substantial in the big picture sense.

But still, he persists. The broken Chris, superbly played by Rob Collins, accuses Travis of not liking blackfellas much, to which, as if to sidestep the question, Travis points out that he doesn’t really like anyone that much. What we hear is that he doesn’t particularly like himself – questions of finding out the truth doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what his feelings for or against First Nations people.

We never really get a sense as to ‘why’, beyond the fact that Travis’s regrets towards his own life, his own family, give his some kind of impetus to help, in some way, Charlotte’s brother and sister to somehow reconcile, which would somehow help the next generation of kids, the eldest of which, Zac (Mark Coe), seems like he’s going down a familiar, depressing path.

And all the while, Travis keeps shooting up. I’m not sure how we’re meant to feel about it. He doesn’t pay a price for it, at least one that we see onscreen. He implausibly shoots up before just before having to drive to Emma’s place for dinner, where he drinks a bunch of beers, doesn’t eat, politely turns Emma down (as he should – detectives should definitely not be sleeping with the family members of murder victims in active cases they’re trying to solve), but then has to drive a bunch of miles to rescue an inconsolably drunk Chris who’s in trouble with the cops yet again, and make sure he gets home okay.

So many people who just cannot ‘get over’ Charlotte’s loss, her disappearance, no matter how many years have past. Stuck in, oh yeah, limbo.

The film is superbly put together, I’m very much guessing, during the lockdown era. There are rarely more than two people on screen, and that works great. The wide shot compositions and alienating cinematography only emphasise that there are hard places to live, and this is one of them. I’m also guessing it was filmed in winter, because the characters here wear some heavy clothing in some scenes, and it gets pretty hot in that part of the world.

All the dialogue is naturalistic and spare, sparse. Most of Travis’s words come out clipped, like he’s cutting them off himself before he says too much. I suspect this mostly comes from doing the dialogue in post-sync / ADR, meaning scenes could be filmed without having to mic up the actors or have a boom operator, and then fill in the dialogue afterwards. That can be a bit alienating (if you notice it), but I just remind myself that almost every great movie of Italy’s social neorealist post-war output or every Hong Kong movie I’ve ever enjoyed had all its dialogue done in post, and it never bothered me back then, so why should it now?

I also want to mention a surprise role for me of the character of Oscar, ably played Joshua Warrior. He isn’t exactly a household name, but I got a big old smile on my face when I realised who he was. Joshua is a stand-up comedian by trade who comes from the (Kokotha) area where this was filmed, and I’ve had the honour of seeing him live at a corporate gig he was hired for last year, for work when I had the misfortune of travelling to Canberra (not by my own will) for some kind of conference. He was deadly funny, and he mentioned, during his performance, having had a role in a film, and how surreal that was.

And this is the film! He plays a character who was brutalised by the cops back in the day, along with a mate, for no other reason that they were two indigenous young blackfellas, who put the finger on Chris for Charlotte’s disappearance, thus setting Chris’s life down a darker path. It’s heartbreaking, because just like Charlotte, none of these people had a choice about what was going to happen to them once the cops got involved.

It’s a slow film, for any person in a rush it’s going to be murder, pardon the pun, so it requires some patience. And for anyone who requires clear, spelled out endings, with neat conclusions, this might disappoint. The point was never about getting a “win” by exactly solving the central crime, because it’s too late to make a difference to the people who remain. There are other ways to help. There are other ways that Travis can help people (but not himself, exactly) before he can escape this place.

Maybe it’s a form of penance. Maybe it’s a way to say sorry. It can't make up for 200 plus years of violence in the colony, but maybe it helps a handful of people.

Who knows, maybe it doesn’t change anything, having come way too late.

8 ways in which we’re still stuck in limbo until there’s a real treaty and constitutional recognition of First Nations people out of 10

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““Why did you come here? What do you want from me?” - Limbo