Australian
Screen

Clip description

The Japanese man (Rikiya Kurokawa) uses his satellite phone to check on his snakes in Tokyo. He speaks to his girlfriend (Yoshiko Tatsumi), and to the police, whom he thinks are listening to his phone. He claims full responsibility for the robbery, as the blind woman (Rose Byrne) imitates the sounds of Japanese. Back in the car, he explains that he was inspired to buy this car from a movie about a French hit man. He asks if she knows this movie, but then he remembers she is blind.

Curator’s notes

The cinematography of this film and Floating Life (1996) is by Dion Beebe, one of Australia’s best new cinematographers of the 1990s. Each film pictures Australia very differently than in most other Australian films. This clip shows several of the key techniques that make this film look so distinctive. The sky is shot with filters on the lens to accentuate the brightness. Many scenes were also bleached in processing, to push the colours. When he’s talking to Tokyo, both figures are lit with harsh low side lights, so that they’re artificially separated from the landscape. These lights come from both sides, a kind of visual contradiction of the senses. In the car, the background comes from rear projection – another abstraction, which makes this scene look unrealistic. We also get scenes of the car in a real landscape, at the beginning and end.

The photo of French film star Alain Delon is from Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Le Samouraï (1967), another very stylised movie. Interestingly, that movie came out in 1967 – which was also the year that director Clara Law, aged 10, moved from Macao, where she was born, to live in Hong Kong with her family. The process of migration has been a constant theme in Law’s work and this may be the year in which that experience became significant in her imagination.