If you liked Mystery Road, you’ll love Ivan Sen’s film Limbo
Simon Baker plays a cop, from a far-off city, sent to a remote opal mining town to review a 20-year-old disappearance.
Limbo (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★★½
Similar in many ways to his earlier Mystery Road and its sequels, Ivan Sen’s new film, Limbo, is an immaculately photographed drama with a setting – the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, named Limbo in the movie – that provides a spectacular backdrop.
A cross between a western and film noir – the perfectly framed and lit Scope-sized images are in black and white – the film is even more successful than its predecessors in creating a sinister mood of past racial injustice and present simmering tension between the races.
Simon Baker plays Travis, a cop from a far-off city, sent to this remote and bleak community to review a 20-year-old disappearance. In 2002, Charlotte, a young Aboriginal woman, went missing.
Leon, an opal miner, was among those who was questioned but never charged.
The original police investigation seems to have been perfunctory with the (white) cops paying more attention to Indigenous “suspects” than to white guys such as Leon.
Travis, who has a heroin addiction, checks into the Limbo Motel – which appears to be constructed around a cave – and starts quizzing locals who might remember events of two decades earlier, among them Charlie (Rob Collins), the brother of the missing girl, Emma (Natasha Wanganeen), her sister, and Joseph (Nicholas Hope), Leon’s reclusive, dissipated brother, who tells him that Leon is dead.
During his stay Travis finds himself drawn to Emma, who earns a meagre living working in the local cafe. A single mother with two daughters, she has also become a mum to Zac (Mark Voe), the surly teenager who lives with her. Emma seems intrigued by Travis’s tired determination and his isolation in this place so far from his home and environment.
As in his previous films, Sen is not particularly interested in solving a mystery; his goal, very skilfully achieved, is to shine a light on a small community where the disadvantaged lives of the Indigenous people are testimony to years of neglect and prejudice.
Sen is very much a hands-on filmmaker; he was personally responsible for the gorgeous cinematography as well as editing the film, composing the apt but minimal music score, writing the screenplay and he is even credited with the visual effects.
Limbo is perhaps his best film to date, a technically accomplished, richly evocative drama that explores, with the eye of an insider, the often tense relationships between Indigenous Australians and white Australians, especially when the latter are represented by an authority figure like Baker’s jaded cop.
As an added bonus, all of the performances are of the first order.
Marlowe (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½
In the footsteps of actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Elliott Gould, all of whom played Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe, here comes a tired-looking Liam Neeson trudging the mean streets of Bay City.
The year is 1939 (the year that Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the first book that featured Marlowe, was published) but this film is based not on Chandler but on “The Black-Eyed Blonde”, a book by John Banville, which gained the approval of the Chandler estate.
Marlowe begins when Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires the gumshoe to locate her missing lover Nico Peterson (Francois Arnaud). Marlowe soon discovers that Peterson is supposedly dead, run over by a car outside an exclusive club run by Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston), who is very obviously a bad guy. But is Peterson really dead?
His sister identified the body, but Clare claims that she saw him alive and well in Tijuana. The trail leads to another low-life, Lou Hendricks (an amusing Alan Cumming) whose driver, Cedric (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), has his own agenda, and to Clare’s ex-movie star mother, Dorothy Quincannon (Jessica Lange), who is also an interested party. Then there’s the welcome presence of Colm Meaney as Bernie, a friendly cop.
The resourceful production design by John Beard (the film was made a long way from Los Angeles, where it is set in a fictitious suburb: shooting was in Barcelona and Dublin) is actually never entirely convincing. Chandler’s plots were often difficult to unravel (Howard Hawks, director of The Big Sleep, 1945, revealed some years later that he never worked out who committed one of the murders in his film) and here the plotting is typically mysterious, with red herrings inserted at regular intervals. Neeson is too old for the role (and admits as much) so that the crucial centrepiece of Marlowe himself is less convincing than he should be.
The Irish director, Neil Jordan, does a competent job, but this is not a patch on his best films, such as The Crying Game (1992) or The End of the Affair (1999).
The Blue Caftan (Le bleu de caftan) (M)
In cinemas
★★★★
A middle-aged married man is attracted to a younger man who works for him. That’s not such an unusual situation and unlikely to be the basis for an unusual film. But The Blue Caftan is a Moroccan film, and homosexuality is illegal in that North African country, punishable by a prison sentence – and that makes the film rather remarkable.
The married man at the centre of this sober, affecting drama is Halim (Salem Bakri), who owns and operates a small shop in the medina of an unnamed city where he and his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal), make bespoke garments in traditional style. Halim is a “maalem”, or master tailor, and he rejects the use of sewing machines even though they would speed up the production of the exquisitely embroidered caftans that he so lovingly creates. He’s old fashioned, religious and devoted to Mina, who is not in the best of health.
Halim has taken on an apprentice to train and help with the work and Youssef (Ayoub Missioui), a sensitive young man, is eager to learn this age-old profession.
The young man’s presence soon begins to affect Halim who has clearly been obliged to keep his sexual proclivities a secret. He does, however, regularly visit a local bath house where he has furtive sexual encounters with other men behind closed doors. It seems probable that Mina is dimly aware of her husband’s secret life, although she never says a word about it. But Youssef is different – his close proximity in the small, claustrophobic shop is a potential threat.
One evening when Halim and Mina are walking home from a cafe they are stopped by police who demand to see their identification papers, and this incident adds to Halim’s anxiety; it’s just a routine check, but it prompts the fear that Halim’s sexual preferences will bring disaster to the couple.
The film, written and directed by Maryam Touzani, is sensually photographed by Virginie Surdej. The opening credits are printed over exquisite images of a hand caressing a roll of turquoise blue cloth, which will be transformed into the caftan that gives the film its title. The garment has been commissioned by a wealthy but obnoxious woman who regularly calls at the shop to complain about the time it’s taking to be finished. In the film’s closing scenes the caftan features prominently but not in the way we might have expected.
This is a tender, beautiful film. Not only is it visually rich but there’s an above-average soundtrack in which the Muslim call to prayer is heard at regular intervals, a further reminder of the pressures bearing down on Halim. The film, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes last year, will probably never be shown in Morocco; a co-production with France, Belgium and Denmark, it’s a small film but a brave one. If I have a criticism it’s that it’s on the long side at just over two hours, yet its graceful, deliberate pacing somehow suits the mood.
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