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Clip description
Maurice Stubbs (Ray Barrett) makes a plaster cast of a paw print in the mud in his stockyards. He suspects a giant feral cat is killing his stock, and he shapes the print with his fingers, as if to make it clearer. Across the valley, Murray Jacob (Richard Roxburgh) discovers his neighbour, the young city girl Ronnie (Miranda Otto), in a paranoid, drug-induced haze. Maurice and his wife Ida (Brenda Blethyn) find further evidence of attack – a kangaroo with its throat ripped out.
Curator’s notes
The film builds an effective sense of the isolation and foreboding beauty of the bush, partly through the lack of much direct sun. The skies throughout are mostly overcast, making it harder to distinguish things – which is one of the governing themes, the uncertainty of life close to nature. The opening scenes stress a sense of altered perception: Ronnie has taken LSD, or something similar, the night before, and she’s still tripping when she tackles Murray Jacob. Maurice is stone cold sober but so traumatised by long-held fears – partly his fear and hatred of cats – that he’s incapable of seeing the print in the mud clearly, or even recognising that he is shaping it to conform to his expectations. The print is much clearer after he takes the cast; but we suspect that it has been made by Ronnie’s knuckles the night before, when she was hallucinating.
There’s a constant tension in the film between men and women, and an overlying tension between the humans and the land. Hostility flares up frequently, both from the land and between the male and female characters. In a sense, this is an almost biblical story: Adam and Eve with two couples, one old, the other younger, but in a landscape that’s a long way from being a Garden of Eden. The kangaroo on the wire is a bit like a harbinger – a message of warning, left by some kind of malignant force that is never clearly seen or defined. That’s perhaps why Maurice apologises to Ida at the end: he knows they’re being punished, and that she’s afraid.
