"Rabbit-Proof Fence"

Artistic humility is the last trait you’d expect to find in a film about a subject as important and painful as the state-sanctioned displacement and forced assimilation of Australia’s indigenous peoples by the British imperial authorities. Too often filmmakers and writers either simplify the issues and the people involved into an easily-digestible series of emotional landing lights or suffocate under the weight of their own reverence. Whether the filmmaker wrongfully trusts the subject’s importance to provide the drama by itself or overexerts him-or-herself in making sure they and the audience feel important and enlightened, many films about massive human rights abuses fall back on prepackaged emotions and worn-out methods of inducing them within their audience, leaving everyone with, at best, only the superficial impression of having learned something.

Which is why Rabbit-Proof Fence is such a welcome surprise; aside from telling a story most non-Australians – myself included – are only vaguely familiar with at best, it breaks no new ground and offers no revelatory intuition into the workings of past or present systemic racism, but unlike most films of its kind, it neither pretends nor intends to do so. Seemingly aware of his own limitations, director Phillip Noyce tells it not as the sobering history lesson most would have opted for, but rather as a straightforward escape-and-survival movie whose story happens to be part of one the most shameful and bitterly debated chapters of Australian history.

Based on the true story of Molly Craig, her sister and her cousin’s escape from one of the many indoctrination camps in which many mixed-race and Aboriginal children were placed, Christine Olsen’s screenplay¹ moves across its events at a casual pace that never focuses on a single attention-seeking moment any longer than it requires at the minimum. This means that the encountered characters, fictional and historical, remain fairly simple constructs, from sweet-sounding nuns to a sexually exploited Aboriginal maid, yet none of them fall into caricature. Even A. O. Neville (Kenneth Branagh), the Chief Protector of Aborigines, despite serving as the film’s villain and spending most of his time dictating orders at his office, is recognizably human; his racism has the calm, rational appearance of benevolent paternalism, rather than the moustache-twirling arrogance of the villains from Man To Man or Tom Felton’s character in the otherwise admirable Belle. The only true effort to further push the audience against him is a subtle, systematic use of slightly skewed or lower angles to film him in every shot above his knees, meaning that the viewer never gets to feel at ease with him by being on the same level.

This economical straight-to-the-point approach also means, however, that the three protagonists get only a minimal amount of characterization to distinguish themselves from each other. With Molly acting as group leader, her cousin Gracie and little sister Sally are mostly defined by their compliance or resistance to her enterprise, be it involuntary (Sally’s physical weakness is her foremost trait) or voluntary (at a crucial point in the film, Gracie sets herself apart by choosing to go to a place where her mother is rumoured to be; that act of autonomy and self-determination proves to be her undoing). That is where the film’s trio of non-professional actresses comes in to further elevate it: Led by a quietly effective Everlyn Sampi as Molly, the three girls express themselves with a natural conviction that, while not as spontaneous or surprising as non-actors from an Italian neorealist film, seldom feels rehearsed or controlled. Like most of the film, they stand out by not trying too hard to do so.

Anyone who has watched a film shot in an Australian landscape, be it one of the Mad Max movies or even Baz Luhrmann’s bloated cliché-ridden epic Australia, knows it to be one of the most cinegenic lands on God’s Earth and Rabbit-Proof Fence illustrates this very well. The country does not appear as strange and alive as in Nicolas Roeg’s haunting masterpiece Walkabout, but its harshness is felt in every close-up and pan. Of particular note is Peter Gabriel’s score, which incorporates Aboriginal chants in keyboard-generated string simulations to great effect, notably alternating between a spooky sense of alienation in the indoctrination camp and comforting release in the climax.

Rabbit-Proof Fence is by no means a great or important film, but its relative lack of ambition makes it infinitely preferable to more lofty-minded Important Issue Movies. Like most films based on true stories, it takes its share of liberties (the dramatic kidnapping that occurs in the film, while a good allegory for what happened to the Aboriginal peoples in general, did not occur in real life, as the girls knew the authorities were coming and opposed no resistance) and some characters, such as the ever-imposing David Gulpilil’s indentured tracker, are intriguing enough to deserve more attention than they get. Nevertheless, its atmosphere and three leads, Sampi chief among them, carry it beautifully enough to put these quibbles to rest.

¹Itself based on Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence, an account of Molly’s story by her daughter Dorothy Pilkington.