Camden New Journal - Movies: Jindabyne

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 24 May 2007

Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) angers the town when he delays reporting a body

Murder rips town apart

JINDABYNE
Directed by Ray Lawrence
Certificate 15

THERE is something uniquely fascinating about Australia’s vast open spaces. Peter Weir captured it with Picnic At Hanging Rock, and others have used the haunting landscape to equal effect. Jindabyne is an admirable example, the name of a township submerged under the waters of a lake by a dam created for a hydro-electric scheme in the Snowy Mountains.
Now there’s a new town with the same name. Four friends take off for their annual fishing trip – a boys’ weekend away entailing a long drive followed by a five-hour hike to a remote spot by a river.
This time they get off to a bad start. Their leader Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) finds the corpse of a murdered woman floating near the shore. Instead of calling the police straight away, he ties the girl’s leg to a submerged branch so that she won’t drift away downstream – and the four agree to go ahead with their holiday. After all, they reason, she’s dead isn’t she? What’s another few days?
When they get home and the truth comes out, the whole town is shocked and angry. The police start to ask questions and the resulting media circus puts fresh pressure on Stewart’s already strained marriage.
His wife (Laura Linney) is caught up with trying to bridge the gap between the town’s black and white cultures, and the couple’s effort to mend fences becomes the focal point of the drama. Meantime, there’s a murderer loose in the streets.
David Williamson’s brooding underwater photography adds a symbolic dimension to the mystery, probing beneath the surface of brittle relationships, guilt and blame. One for cinema connoisseurs.

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