Sweet Country
“Why did you run, Sam?”
“Cos I shot a white fella.”
Warwick Thornton’s blood-soaked vision is a tender but painful epic that follows the trials and tribulations of Sam Kelly, an Aboriginal farmer who flees for his life after killing a sadistic white settler in self-defence.
Raw and unyielding, this is a story as beautiful, fierce and merciless as the Australian outback where it sets its stage. If we were just focusing on the landscapes (some scenes are so damn gorgeous they make National Geographic photoshoots look like a toddler’s snappy snaps) then this would be a pretty happy story, but unfortunately it has chosen to settle on the lives of the humans who walk through it, so it’s almost unremitting misery and suspense from start to finish.
Writers Steven McGregor and David Tranter bring us a searing outback western that finally allows Australia’s indigenous population to tell their version of history after all this time and shines a much-needed light on frontier violence and the exploitation of natives by white settlers. All-in-all it’s a dazzling, timeless benchmark for Aboriginal cinema that will pick and pluck your heartstrings like harp.
Sweet Country is about as far from Mad Max as it’s possible to get. For starters, there are significantly fewer testosterone-boosted, nitrous-cranked car chases, surreal one-liners and Tina Turner looking like she wants to chew you in half. For seconds, the white people are as far from the Mel Gibson anti-hero from hell as it’s possible to get. Picture how much 12 Years A Slave lowered your belief in human beings, then double it. Stranded in a searing oven of misery, the perpetually sun-stricken, drunk, aimless and godless white settlers clearly have nothing but intolerance in their hearts for the Aboriginal population, let alone any remorse for savaging their land and ripping them from their lives, traditions and loved ones. There is a speck of optimism in the mix, kudos to the oh-so Christian warm-hearted farmer Fred Smith (Sam Neill) who shines some much-needed rays of hope in this hellish mirage of a story.
The real star of the show, however, is non-professional actor Hamilton Morris who plays Sam. Humble and reserved, you see him bent-backed and burdened by the abuse of the deranged drunk Harry March (Ewen Leslie), so when Sam fights back you are so invested in his struggle it’s all you can do not to shriek encouragement at the screen.
Without a soundtrack, Sweet Country offers precious few reprieves from the horrors of colonialism, but the flip-side is that when you’re hit with some moments of pure, poetic wonderment it’s all you can do to stop your jaw from hitting the cinema carpet.
Flashes of moments gone, moments to come and visions of alternate happenings pepper the film like gunshot. You get a sense that the past/present/future sense of time doesn’t quite operate how we’d expect it to this world of red rocks, rum, chains and salt planes. The surreal time-hopping of the film gets you to see how hopeless the alliances between the two races were when the white colonisers try to apply their empirical, Christian laws and logic to a world governed by the Aboriginal concepts of ‘dreamtime’ and ‘everywhen’. Sweet Country manages to be dreamlike and sharply awake in tandem. It’s a world that to many might appear unreal and buried under the garbage dump of history, yet discussions of race-relations and hostilities have never been more detrimental, and the film pleads with you to let this corner of history be re-examined and born witness to.
A gorgeous, brutal, picturesque nightmare, Sweet Country is a film that is by turns mesmeric and terrifying and deserves every bit of praise being thrown at it, and then some.
9/10
