Sadly Over-hyped

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Lena is blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Most see her as white at first glance. She has an Aboriginal mother and an Irish father. When her mother gets her brother arrested, she decides to leave. She fails to get back on the bus at a stop. She starts walking and is joined by Vaughn. He escaped from low security prison work detail to go home to see his sick mother. The two struggle over views as they sometimes hitch rides.There is a quiet sincerity personified by Lena. It is slow at times with its quietness. However, there is also a magnetism about the two leads. The young actors possess a dignity and power within them. It's an intriguing theatrical debut for filmmaker Ivan Sen.

Firstly, I am shocked at all the positive reviews for this film. On a superficial level it is a fine film; technically very strong and well-paced. However, the film is full of so much contradictory stereotyping and half-baked social commentary that it falls flat on its face. The acting is also terribly wooden, and I doubt I can find the kindness within myself to call it 'understated'. The music comes in when any small drama occurs, and the audience is pushed to care for two characters who really never become likable because they are played by two blank-faced actors.I am particularly intrigued as to why an Aboriginal director would want to perpetuate the stereotype of his people - Drugs? Guns? Tattoos? Domestic abuse? Teenage pregnancy? Drinking? EVEN an eyepatch? Aren't you going a bit far? And every time director Sen tries to de-construct or analyse this stereotype he ends up reverting back to it (one specific example is when Vaughn spits in the cop's face). The stereotyping of white police is especially brutal - there is not one decent cop around according to this film. In fact, white people in general are not too favourably looked upon. The only nice white person in this film is an old man who gives our two heroes a lift, and possibly the conveniently named "Sean", which gives the Irish-wannabe Lena a little pang.The other white characters try to kidnap Lena or treat Aborigines disrespectfully.The camera-work is often too obvious. A hand-held camera arrives to shake things up whenever an upset occurs. A fight, the threat of violence, sickness - the hand-held camera is there to tell us, "Wow, isn't the situation getting intense!", but after spending so much time establishing a static mood through gratuitous landscape and time-lapse shots of clouds, the hand-held is an obvious symbolic device and director would've done better keeping his style consistent. The use of tracking shots was often very disrupting to the flow of the film as well, except in the last sequence where it is quite effective.But unfortunately by that stage, I couldn't care less what happened to the characters, as they stared blankly at each other 'til the end.The one thing to admire about this film, however, are the good intentions behind it. This movie failed on an emotional engagement level, but for the sheer effort involved in its making, and its technical triumphs, it gets 5/10, which I think is fair.

I have little to add to the excellent reviews above. Tarkovsky? Tykwer? No wonder I loved it. I shall go away and have a good think about those connections. My contribution is a bit of information about Australian aboriginals that may help non-Australians appreciate this exquisite movie.1. It is normal for Australian aboriginals to take a while to speak to each other (or anyone) if they are strangers. When thinking about this I compared the film to Eric Rohmer and to Iranian films about young people. Iranians and Rohmer characters chatter endlessly about trivia but the powerful effect of the movie creeps up on you in the same way.2. It is easy to miss the moment in which Vaughan discovers that Lena is Aboriginal. This is an important turning point in the film. To avoid spoiling I'll only give you a tip. An older person is involved and there is no discussion. If you watch for it you will see it.

This is a deceptively simple story of two young people, both on the run, meeting up on a rural New South Wales road. Both are aboriginal and both are, for family reasons, headed for Sydney. Nothing particularly dramatic happens but there is enough incident to keep the viewer watching, and perhaps see life as it is for alienated young blacks in contemporary Australia. The director, Ivan Sen, has a strong visual sense, and he captures the land with breathtaking vistas (he also wrote much of the music). It is not the outback, it is the central west New South Wales of big commercial farming – cotton, sunflowers and corn, yet even the big farms are dwarfed by their surroundings. The young couple proceeds through this magnificent landscape beneath the clouds of the title preoccupied by their own problems, though the boy (Damien Pitt) is angrily aware that this is the land taken from his forbears. She (Danielle Hall) on the other hand rejects her Aboriginal background and focuses on her Irish father and the green misty land he came from.The dialogue is pretty sparse and the delivery often a little wooden but the two leads express the emotions required more than adequately. Their relationship could not be further from a conventional teen romance, rather they are two emotionally stunted people who come to realise they can still care for someone else.As for the rest, there are the inevitable black brothers in clapped out HQ Holdens, a just cruisin' but still hassled by the police, and plenty of hostile or merely patronising whites. One old white man (Arthur Dignam) does give them a lift but most whites give our couple a wide berth. I thought the story required a little more development; the film describes a situation rather than tells a story, but it does so with great simplicity and honesty. It's a cliché I know, but I await Ivan Sen's next work with great interest – he's a considerable talent.