CHARLIE’S COUNTRY (Rolf de Heer). 108 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (August 21). Rating: NNNN
Watch online: iTunes
Legendary Australian actor David Gulpilil and his Ten Canoes director, Rolf de Heer, reunite for a more grounded drama about an aging Aboriginal who decides to leave his community and live by the old ways, only to find himself drifting into increasingly unpleasant situations.
Its a beautifully photographed, unrelentingly bleak picture that works as a Rorschach test for the viewers empathy. De Heer and Gulpilil, who wrote the script together, keep asking us to consider how complicit Charlie is in his own unhappiness a key sequence in Darwin, when he falls in with a group of drinkers, should prove particularly divisive.
But Gulpilils simmering performance tells us everything we need to know about Charlies choices. It speaks to a life of anger and despair, and of submission to white authority so deeply internalized that its become his normal way of doing things.
His characters profoundly tragic subtext is completely alien to the way Gulpilil has been presented in other movies. Films like Nicolas Roegs Walkabout and Philip Noyces Rabbit-Proof Fence cast him as an almost mystical figure possessed of knowledge and abilities beyond his white co-stars.
This vision of an Aboriginal is demonstrably not that, and thats the point. In Charlies Country, the actor shows us how most of his countrymen really view him.
