Australian
Screen

Clip description

In a flashback to the blind woman’s childhood, her mother Marie (Elise McCredie) tries to teach the child to pray, in a disused outback church. The child (Bree Beadman) has repeatedly tried to tell her mother that her grandfather is abusing her. Marie eventually confronts her father (Nicholas Hope) – accusing him of raping the child. His answer is that she enjoyed it – just like Marie did when she was a child.

Curator’s notes

The film explores both light and dark and a series of opposites. JM (Japanese Man) comes from the futuristic city of Tokyo; BG (Blind Girl) is trapped in the traumas of her past. He is obsessed with material possessions; she would happily give him the car for which he is prepared to pay $35,000. He is afraid of intimacy; she craves it, even though she’s the one who has been sexually abused. He thinks a hit man is cool; she hears the impact of insects on the windscreen as the sound of death. As the film progresses, the tone goes from light and quirky humour to a dark sense of generational trauma. BG’s grandmother Esther, the first one to own the car, disappeared without trace 30 years earlier. Marie goes insane and tries to kill both herself and her blind nine-year-old daughter. BG herself is on a journey towards vengeance. That is why she persuades the Japanese man to take her to the outback camp where her grandfather is still mining opals. She intends to kill him. BG is both goddess and avenging angel, in that sense, travelling in a car that 'has fallen from the sky’ (see clip one).

This film has multiple layers of nuance and meaning, yet it retains a fairly direct emotional clarity, which comes largely through Rose Byrne’s superb performance (she won Best Actress at the 2000 Venice Film Festival). Rikiya Kurokawa had virtually no acting experience and not very much English, but his performance has an elegant naiveté. Kurokawa was a male model in Japan. There is a strong narrative connection between this film and Clara Law’s Autumn Moon (1992), the story of an unlikely friendship between a Japanese man and a Hong Kong schoolgirl, set in Hong Kong.