Australian
Screen

Clip description

Masura (Shingo Usami), lying down, has just finished remembering the events depicted in a flashback: in a combat zone in the south-west Pacific the exhausted Masura was ordered by his commanding officer to get back on his feet and march in the direction of the enemy. Masura gets up and stumbles across a tree-covered hill until he spies Jack (Jai Koutrae) sitting on a rock with his back to him. Masura walks towards the unsuspecting Jack but falls to the ground. Jack, hearing him, turns, sees him and confronts him with his rifle. There is a tense standoff.

Curator’s notes

This scene is designed to closely echo the scene that immediately preceded it. It’s significant that in both scenes Masura is lying down from exhaustion before returning to his feet and stumbling forward when he has no motivation to continue. The only way his action can be resolved is with death or capture. Masura’s earlier jungle experience obviously climaxed with his capture (not depicted but logically implied). Likewise in this present day scene Masura accidentally stumbles across Jack, whose instincts are immediately to take the escaped prisoner of war captive.

In dramatic terms the scene depicts the end of the film’s first act – we’ve got to know something of the two characters separately. From here onwards their paths will be entwined.

The slightly washed-out cinematography, reminiscent of artificially tinted picture postcards, subtly marks out these present day scenes from the flashbacks (Jack’s First World War flashbacks are tinted blue-green while Masura’s Pacific jungle scenes are vividly colourful). It lends the attractive scenery a washed-out look that reflects the dispirited psyches of both men. Jack’s face gains a sickly, yellowish hue that underlines his poor health (as we have seen before, he coughs and hacks constantly, a lasting side effect of exposure to German gas attacks during the last war).