Indigenous Australian police detective Jay Swan rolls into the makeshift town of Goldstone like the Man With No Name in an Abel Ferrara Fistful of Dollars reboot – mysterious, taciturn, in the midst of an emotional and spiritual crisis, and utterly hammered. Ivan Sen’s Goldstone is a spin-off from, rather than a sequel to, his Mystery Road, in which Swan (Aaron Pedersen) investigated the murder of a young Indigenous Australian woman in a small town riddled with racism. In the interim period, we gather that Jay has lost his daughter, and that the clean-cut detective of the previous film has been replaced by an all but broken man.
In the new film, Sen – an Australian film-maker of dual heritage – pits Jay against a corrupt mining company attempting a land grab that will destroy land considered sacred. Goldstone sees Sen sharpen his criticism of the displacement of Indigenous Australians, and intensify all the slow-burning tension, strikingly powerful use of silence, and visionary landscape photography of his earlier piece. Still very much in the “outback noir” genre, Sen uses the cliches and tropes as the framework in which to explore the themes at the film’s heart – capitalism and greed v nature and spirituality – and to trace Jay’s journey through grief towards grace.
There is something of Terrence Malick’s Emersonian philosophy at work in Sen’s exploration of the material/spiritual divide, and sections of the film reach for the visual lyricism and non-verbal storytelling of Days of Heaven or The New World. Pedersen’s performance is essentially a physical one: he has only 20-odd lines of dialogue in the whole film, most delivered with a bitter snarl through a haze of cigarette smoke. Even here, the emotional melody of the scene flashes in his eyes, the set of his hunched shoulders telling more than any monologue. In Mystery Road, Sen repeatedly shot Jay on the horizon silhouetted against the sky, emphasising both his societal alienation and his connection to the land. In Goldstone, however, Jay is often seen inside, confined in his temporary trailer home or framed in windows and doorways. Even when outdoors on the endless plains that surround the town, he is captured in the lens of a CCTV camera.
Both Mystery Road and Goldstone are punctuated by striking aerial shots, apparently accomplished using a hovering drone camera. In the earlier film, we see Jay driving his car through a labyrinth of gridded streets, in a visual correlative for the dead ends and wrong turns of his investigation. In Goldstone, Sen uses the God’s-eye view when Jay is out in the bush, so the beauty of the land is suddenly revealed to us. As Australian critic Emma Westwood has noted, these shots are suggestive of Indigenous dot paintings, and the colours, textures and markings create compositions that work in the same way as an abstract painting by Miró or Klee. By having Jay move through them, his shadow elongated in the low winter sun, Sen lends him a rare sense of power and belonging.
Goldstone is more directly expressive of Indigenous Australian spirituality than its predecessor, thanks in no small part to the presence of David Gulpilil. Since Nicolas Roeg plucked him from a traditional upbringing in the bush to star in Walkabout in 1971, Gulpilil has appeared in a number of films including Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Rolf de Heer’s beautiful Charlie’s Country. Here he plays Jimmy, an enigmatic elder who refuses to give his consent to the mining company. It is a small, quiet role that resonates outwards like fault lines opening in the earth, irrevocably altering the landscape.
Jay first encounters Jimmy in the desert on the outskirts of town, his lithe frame seated with a very particular languor: reposed but watchful, a silent guardian of the bush. As Ishmael says of Queequeg in Moby Dick: “There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilised hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was … yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.”
Deeper than friendship, the unspoken connection between Jay and Jimmy is one of shared cultural identity, and the elder will become the catalyst for Jay’s emotional healing and embrace of his spiritual heritage.
The Australian author and film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has said that Goldstone should be considered the most important film Australian film of this year. For it’s ambition – both formal and spiritual – and it’s humanist moral stance, let’s hope it will transcend borders to be appreciated by cinemagoers across the world.
• Goldstone is playing at the London film festival
