Beyond the Multiplex

"Jindabyne": A dead woman in a beautiful river equals a fishing trip ruined and a town torn apart
When Ray Lawrence's haunting, almost existential, inside-out murder mystery "Lantana" appeared in 2001, it literally seemed like a movie from out of nowhere. Australian cinema had been quiet and not terribly ambitious in the years before that, and Lawrence himself seemed like a ghost from the past. (His only previous film, "Bliss," had been released in 1985.) By his standards, making another film just five years later is a burst of frenetic activity.

Lawrence's "Jindabyne," which premiered at Cannes last spring, has much of the same mysterious magic. Like "Lantana," it's a relationship movie -- specifically, a movie about the perils and pitfalls of marriage -- that takes advantage of Australia's distinctive scenery and sunshine, and that comes artfully draped in the trappings of a thriller. If you can speak of a Lawrence formula after just two pictures, it involves a couple of intriguing actors with Hollywood credentials (Barbara Hershey and Anthony LaPaglia in "Lantana"; Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne here) in a domestic situation that grows ever darker and more enigmatic.

Adapted by Beatrix Christian from the Raymond Carver short story "So Much Water So Close to Home" (also the basis for one of the segments in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts"), "Jindabyne" revolves a group of working-class men from the eponymous resort town in the mountains of New South Wales. Under the leadership of garage mechanic Stewart (Byrne), a local-hero type who was once a championship sports-car driver, these guys separate from their wives and girlfriends for a long-running annual ritual, a fishing trip deep into the wilderness, with no women invited.

Except that one is already there. Floating in their beloved river, the men find a dead girl of 20 or so, dressed only in underwear. She has clearly been murdered (and we know more about what has befallen her than they do). For reasons that are partly ambiguous and partly as clear as day -- the trout are jumping, the weather is magnificent, the girl is beyond help -- the men remain on the river for two more days, and don't report the discovery until they get back to their car and can make a phone call. (No, smart guy, there's no cell service out there.)

Tabloid and TV reporters jump on the case, partly because the girl was of aboriginal heritage and ethnic tensions in Jindabyne are already high, and the men become pariahs in their hometown. (The racial element does not exist in the Carver story.) Stewart's American-born wife, Claire (Linney), becomes obsessed with the case, seeking closure with the young woman's family (who don't want her around). You don't get the sense that Stewart and Claire had the most communicative marriage of all time (his nosy Irish mother, marvelously played by Betty Lucas, acts as the go-between), but the unsolved mystery of the fishing-trip-gone-wrong threatens to rip it apart, along with the rest of downscale Jindabyne society.

There are moments when the racial undercurrent of "Jindabyne" begins to gum up the narrative and overwhelm Lawrence's subtle, compassionate and even spiritual treatment of these people and this place. But I wish one-tenth of the films I saw were made with this much craft and integrity, this much intuitive understanding of where to put the camera, how much of the story to explain in words (not much) and how much to trust his outstanding cast to carry the film with their voices, faces and bodies.

When Lawrence called me from his home in Australia, he cheerfully announced, "It's tomorrow here." He reported fine mid-morning autumn weather, while it was still the previous night (and spring) in New York.

How would you characterize the relationship of this film to the Carver short story? It's different in many ways.

When I first started reading Carver, it was an inspiration in terms of characters and context and subtext. I always loved this story, and thought it would be a wonderful thing to try to make a film out of. But after Altman did "Short Cuts," I thought, well, that's it. I'm never going to do that one.

Still, it stuck with me. The question of that unique moral dilemma. The men in Carver's story are different from the men in "Jindabyne," but the basic manner in which they react to the wives is the same. It's the thing I've always been interested in: the male-female thing. The differences and the conflicts, and how they stay together.

So what is the unique moral dilemma?

It's the question of responsibility. You know, Carver once said that he saw a man on an airplane, several rows ahead of him -- he couldn't see his face -- take off his wedding ring and slip it in his pocket. He said, "That's all I need." That was a big inspiration to me.

Then, when we decided to make the young woman an aboriginal, the story suddenly took off. There were a whole lot of things to work with, and we just went with it.

There's a spiritual aspect to this story that we shouldn't give away. But let's say there are shots that seem to be point-of-view shots, but they're not from any living person who's actually there.

Yes, it's a ghost story. In aboriginal culture, the highest point in the landscape is the spiritual center, and these are the highest mountains in Australia, even if they're pretty small by your standards.

This film is partly about things that haunt you from the past. What haunts Claire's character, and what haunts the men. On a bigger scale there's what haunts our country, the way we treated the aboriginal people.

There is a murder in this film, but it's not really a murder mystery.

I didn't want it to be a murder mystery. I don't have anything against genre films but I don't seem to make them. I wanted everybody to know who did the murder straight away, and it's important that he never gets caught. Evil is just a part of life; it's always with us. Those point-of-view shots are to set up the idea that we are always being watched. You can read into that what you like, but it's something that we live with.

So why don't the men report the dead girl for three days? It would have been pretty easy to do the right thing.

I wanted to make the film with enough room for people to have opinions other than mine. But if you're asking me, it's nothing too complicated. It's a beautiful day, one of them goes off to have a quick flick and catches a beautiful fish. Let's call it the lure of their original intentions.

You've become known for shooting almost every scene in one take. Actors love you for that, I suppose. Why is that important?

I want to get to the truth of every scene, and get to the heart of it as quickly as possible. So I tell the cast, let's not do a load of takes. Let's do very few takes and if we get it in one, that's fine. They're all theater actors, and when they go on stage they're doing one take for two hours. It can be scary for them at first, because that's not the way that films are usually done. But it's not as if I invented this. Laura Linney told me that Clint Eastwood works in a similar way.

It's about giving the actors the freedom to know that their choices are precious and I won't ask them to keep making them and making them. I think a lot of the paraphernalia of making films just gets in the way. Ken Loach said he hates to see crew members sitting around in baseball caps just out of the shot. It's off-putting and distracting, and I try to get rid of as much of that stuff as I can. If I could get rid of the camera, I would.

"Jindabyne" opens April 27 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.