SFF NOTES: Goldstone (2016, Dir. Ivan Sen)

Reaction to Ivan Sen’s Goldstone has been tightly linked to reaction to its precursor, Mystery Road. It seems if you were wowed by the first film, you’ll enjoy but not necessarily be bowled over by this follow-up. If, like me, you were left simultaneously impressed and unsatisfied by the first film, this one may well wow. It did me.

I’m reticent to use the label “sequel” here, though in most respects it is. But there are parallels between the two films that go beyond extending Sen’s original narrative and step into the realm of re-interpretation. The writer/director/cinematographer/editor/composer has tweaked his formula, rebalanced the different components; so the chemistry of Goldstone, that strange alchemy of elements mixed together to elicit a forceful reaction, is familiar, yet more potent.

There are numerous elements (of narrative, of character, of theme) that replay within Sen’s new environment and flourish there. In the spirit of this, I’ve repurposed my original review of Mystery Road, strengthened its interpretation and deepened its affirmation of Sen’s power as a filmmaker.

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There really is nothing like a sunset in the Australian outback, the endless sky cut through with a gradient of a thousand blues, pinks and oranges. Point a camera at it and you've got an instant masterpiece. Ivan Sen, one of this country's most visually acute film makers, understands this completely and he works it to his best advantage. But though Sen goes to great pains to capture the beauty of the outback in all of its serene majesty, his film is more about the outback's brutal indifference than its enormous grandeur.

Its brutal indifference and the corrupted, self-serving inhabitants that damage themselves, each other and the soul of the entire nation.

Reprising as Aboriginal police detective, Jay Swan, Aaron Pedersen is in exceptional form here. He is not the same man he was when we last saw him in his first case. Jay's attempts to track down the girl's murderer led him into a tangle of drugs and prostitution that cut across cultural lines, even coming up to his own family's doorstep. The experience has broken him, or almost has. We’re re-introduced to him after he is pulled over by small town copper, Josh (Alex Russell). He’s drunk. He’s driving. He’s kept overnight in an open-doored lock-up.

Given the state of Jay, why he’s in town takes an immediate backseat to how he’s ended up as he has. To my mind this is where Goldstone begins to clamber over its predecessor. Truth be told, the mystery side of Mystery Road wasn't particularly engaging. Its noir-treading narrative anchored it in a way that worked against its uncomfortable, self-examining enigma. Sen struggled to balance the feeling that something isn’t right (a sense that extends beyond Jay’s immediate concerns) and the investigation into what that something was (the immediate concern). Though Sen has an ear for Aussie vernacular and a strong sense of the outback character, his instincts for murder mystery tend toward simplistic, often self-evident, paper chasing. What actually made Mystery Road compelling was the combative environment that Sen threw his archetypal hero into.

In Goldstone he makes even more of this. He thins out the narrative and engages with the environment with silent visual intensity. The dialogue is pared back to bare utterances. The characters are hollowed out to cyphers. And the case that does evolve around Jay is as big as the country - it touches on the sovereignty of mining companies (with David Wenham, King-Gee’d to the nines as a mine site despot), political pocket-lining (with mayoral Jackie Weaver all lipstick, smiles and baked goods), prostitution and human trafficking (with Michelle Lim Davidson recalling the Chinese immigrants exploited during the gold rush) and police corruptibility and indifference (with Russell’s naïve cop on life lesson duties).

In this nether-space, this place that is almost our world, that is hyper-representative of our institutions and of our interactions, Sen works his disturbing magic.

He’s blunt. He goes broad, even humorous, but there is a biting melancholy that keeps the humour tied to a darker truth. Sen captures the sardonic aggression of outback masculinity almost to a fault. Had I not lived out bush for a number of years, the cringe-worthily blusterous entitlement of the old white men with guns would have struck me as hideous caricature. But it is unfortunately all too true, and here he extends it beyond the individual, into a collective, impossible-to-identify national menace.

To achieve this, Sen goes beyond Jay’s narrative, which centres as much on his rehabilitation as his investigation, and picks up the other characters’ stories, providing them with interrogative space. As with previous festival prize winner, Only God Forgives, which shares a similar pace and visual aesthetic, Sen invites interpretation. Giving little, his visual and auditory scapes allow time for the film’s heavy sadness to seep in. Russell’s eye-opening, with its air of dispassionate attraction, becomes a near-disinterested proxy for all of us. Weaver's acidic politics (a clear pull-through from her performance in Animal Kingdom) and her twisted entanglements with Wenham’s body corporate throb with society-sanctioned invincibility. And Pedersen’s attempts to unveil the structural inequalities at play level the soul with their futility.

This is Sen's Australia. The Australia we have inherited from our ancestors and never engaged with. It is the Australia that floats on top of greed and lies and blood.

Sen is one of our most ambidextrous film makers (here taking on the role of director, director of photography, writer, editor and composer) and while producing a film while wearing so many hats deserves significant commendation. I have always found Sen's work to hit its peak in its more ethereal moments and in Goldstone he has worked this mire of intangibility, this unspeakable horror, this indistinct corruption, into a portrait of our country that rivals Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher in its nation-examining murkiness.

The past we have never dealt with still threatens to disfigure our future.

The ongoing and insidious war between black and white is a war without a front line and with no end in sight. It is a war where affiliations aren't necessarily revealed by the colour of your skin. Sen doesn't give answers. There really aren't any to give. The outback is a broken land filled with broken people, at least when it comes to race relations. Mystery Road called them out on this. 

Goldstone decries it to the endless horizon; its scream sent out without echo, tearing through time, unable to repair, repatriate or reconcile.

This is Australia.

★★★★☆

Trailer:

Goldstone screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.