Share
Clip description
Ronnie (Miranda Otto) has slept through another attack, during which her 11 Muscovy ducks have been mutilated. Ida (Brenda Blethyn) leaves for church in the nearby town. Maurice (Ray Barrett) recalls how they got married – when he thought she was pregnant. He enters the bedroom where their baby died, remembering that the cat lapped up the baby’s spilled bottle. He retreats in haste to go fishing, as Murray Jacob buries the remains of the dead ducks.
Curator’s notes
The film experiments with both the form of the script and the style of the images, as we see in this clip. Each character is given a dream sequence, but we’re sometimes unsure who’s doing the dreaming. The narration is all from Maurice, but he admits he has been experiencing Ida’s dreams. There’s often a blurring of the sense of reality – as with the actual blurring of the image beside Miranda Otto’s face, late in the clip. The presence of dead animals is common in the first half, giving both a sense that life in the bush is lived close to death – but also a hint of the supernatural. Ronnie is almost made out to be a modern witch; the dead animals may in a sense be some kind of sacrifice.
