Iconographic and idiosyncratic, the indigenous performer David Gulpilil dominates every shot of CHARLIE’S COUNTRY, the latest collaboration between the actor and film maker Rolf De Heer.
Not strictly biographical, CHARLIE’S COUNTRY is “authentic” to Gulpilil’s experience of things and his portrayal of Charlie projects an intuitive verisimilitude.
Charlie lives in a remote Northern Territory community where intervention, like political correctness, has gone overboard, and white fella policing steeples the dogmatic to the Draconian.
Charlie doesn’t understand that coppers get a house from the government but he is denied a house in his own land. Eschewing the sugar and fat saturated tucker of the settlement’s take away food joint, Charlie goes bush, shooting a buffalo for personal consumption, only to have his firearm confiscated because it is not registered. When he makes a spear to go hunting, that too is confiscated as a deadly weapon.
Jack of the bull dust bureaucracy, Charlie boosts a cop car and drives it outback to begin again, living off the land in his country. But age, a western diet, tobacco and alcohol abuse, leaves him vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.
On the verge of death, Charlie finds himself in a Darwin hospital, where an old mate is surviving a living death on dialysis. Charlie discharges himself and falls in with a group of long grassers, ostensibly homeless indigenous people camping on the outskirts of the city, whiling away the time drinking and smoking.
Charged with vagrancy and obtaining grog for restricted persons, Charlie is incarcerated, suffering a spiritual death in custody in pride diminishing detention.
Ian Jones’ wide-screen cinematography captures the majestic landscape, as it did in a previous De Heer/Gulpilil collaboration, THE TRACKER, but it’s matched here by awesome dose of close ups on Gulpilil, that face, those eyes, so evocative. It’s a face that fuses man to land, individual to culture, undeniably, emphatically, powerfully.
Leavening the sadness of the narrative is the cheeky humour, an iron bark irony of Blackfella larrikinism , a snub thumbing of the nose, tell it like it is anti authoritarianism. The self deprecating essence of the scene where Charlie is asked to use his skills as a tracker against drug traffickers is priceless. Something understood and shared by all of us, hopefully.
CHARLIE’S COUNTRY is a must visit on your movie going itinerary.