Australian
Screen

Clip description

John Woldring (William McInnes) stares at the telephone, as if contemplating telling someone about the distressed young woman he’s just found. The whistle of a boiling kettle initially masks (and then becomes confused with) Tahmeena’s (Monic Hendrickx) screams as she awakens from a nightmare and recalls a traumatic memory of sexual assault. John’s attempt at physically subduing her makes Tahmeena fight back, as she misinterprets it as an attack.

Curator’s notes

The emergence of Tahmeena’s screams from the sound of the whistling kettle is indicative of the imaginative sound design of Andrew Plain, Annie Breslin and William Ward. The device represents the normality of John’s everyday existence being ruptured by the intrusion of this traumatised newcomer; her pain will from now on be his domestic reality. Comparison with the equivalent scene in The Polish Bride (1998, the Dutch film that serves as the basis for Unfinished Sky) shows the Australian remake correcting a logical flaw.

In the first film, the flashbacks of sexual assault occur while the young woman is sleeping, creating an unhelpfully ambiguous effect – are they nightmares or memories? In the second film, the flashbacks only start when Tahmeena is awake, which makes it clear they represent her actual memories. This also makes her distress more extreme and unnerving as the flashbacks are in effect the nightmare she cannot awaken from. John does not intend to harm her when he struggles to subdue her but his physical strength merely intensifies her fear of him as a man, and leads to major conflict in the following scene.