Australian
Screen

Clip description

In a flashback, Max Stuart (David Ngoombujarra) is under interrogation in the Ceduna police station. Constable Jones (Garry Waddell) beats him, another policeman throttles him. Detective Sergeant Turner (Roy Billing) begins to dictate a confession, correcting Stuart’s English for the record. A voice-over narration makes clear that this scene is one possible version of the truth – as seen by Max’s lawyer, David O’Sullivan (Robert Carlyle). In the car outside Adelaide Gaol, O’Sullivan and his legal partner Helen Devaney (Kerry Fox) discuss the implications of going after the police.

Curator’s notes

The film presents several conflicting versions of this interrogation, in order to make the construction of the truth a central question. In the first version, Constable Jones dictates the confession without requiring input from Max Stuart, who is wearing clothes during the interrogation, and is not beaten. In fact, Stuart says nothing at all during this first interrogation. He is literally 'without a voice’. The scene shown here occurs in the midst of Stuart’s first trial in Adelaide, during which David O’Sullivan has alleged the police beat the confession out of him. O’Sullivan does this even before Max Stuart has alleged any such beating took place. What we are watching here is O’Sullivan’s version of what happened, but there’s a strong sense that he may have put the words in his client’s mouth. Helen Devaney, for one, is far from sure that O’Sullivan is correct in his interpretation of what happened. It is unusual for any historically-based film to present such a contested view of the truth, but it’s the central structural idea of Louis Nowra’s script. There is a famous precedent in the 1950 Japanese classic Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, in which a rape and murder is dissected from four different points of view.