LIMBO begins with an Aboriginal painting that gradually fades into the cobbled landscape of the sere and foreboding landscape of the Australian outback. That is where Travis Hurley (Simon Baker) has been sent to look into re-opening the cold case of a missing Aboriginal girl who vanished from the eponymous town of Limbo twenty years previously. The chain-smoking city cop, who is carrying an excess of emotional baggage himself, will encounter a local police force more interested in terrorizing the local Aborigines, and the Aboriginal locals with tight lips, suspicious eyes, and a quiet hostility born of centuries of colonial repression and grinding racism.
Ivan Sen’s spare tale of despair and redemption blends the western genre with a noir idiom, resulting in a morality tale that is less concerned with the truth than with the wellspring of evil that led to the crime. The mystery of what happened to the girl is tinged with a delicate mysticism that starts with the metaphor of the town’s name and expands with the angel wings tattooed on Travis’ back (fallen angel?), and the Aboriginal beliefs that persist but without comfort to the people wrenched from their own culture by their European colonizers. Western beliefs enter into it, too, though they fail to comfort Travis as he listens to recorded sermons as he drives into town, or the recorded loop droning in the local church explaining the ecclesiastical meaning of limbo as a way station between Heaven and Hell while parsing their colors.
No such colors intrude in the carefully composed tableaus, shot in wide-angle and deep focus to emphasize the vast indifference of the landscape, and the tomb-like nature of the re-purposed opal mines exploited by the Europeans and now serving as the Limbo Motel where Travis is staying, and that ci-mentioned church. It is a series of still lives in black-and-white depicting people in stasis, too mired by the past to hope for a future.
Yet the film is vibrant with the sweetened sounds that echo the emptiness of the terrain, where files buzz and the wind blows. It’s also vibrant with performances that are understated but powerful. The way the missing girl’s sister, Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) asks Travis if his coffee is white enough after setting it down on the table when he comes looking for her at the café where she works is a damning précis on colonialism summed up in a few indelible seconds of screen time. As are the hundreds of holes left by the mining operation that abandoned the people who lived there, leaving them to glean the mineral refuse left behind when the the mines stopped producing enough for the bottom line.
Stories of beatings the hands of the police become all the more shocking when told by the victims with no visible affect, mirroring Travis’ numbness when he arrives, a numbness that begins to dissipate as he delves into the disappearance and becomes caught up in the lives lost and the lives played out with a stoic resignation.
Baker, who co-produced, makes Travis a haunting anti-hero who has gone beyond mere cynicism into the realm of the walking dead. He moves slowly and deliberately, questioning witnesses with impersonal courtesy, rubbing the back of his buzz-cut head as a tell on those rare occasions that is he is flummoxed, or shooting up when he first arrives at his motel where no other creature stirs. The way he melts onto the bed as the drug takes effect bespeaks respite from his own vast emptiness. As his pilgrim’s progress evolves, there are the most subtle of changes in body language, in the set of the eyes. It registers with us, aided by Sen’s measured close-ups that capture the inner processes of re-awakened possibilities chipping away layers of subsumed emotions that Travis had consigned to oblivion rather than experience the anguish they bring. This is an arresting performance, that, like the film itself, is sculpted from what is not said and what is not done, revealing the essence of the story with inference and innuendo.
LIMBO is a mystery that uses the history of Australia as its framework and the human soul as its scope. In it, we are confronted with past sins that cannot be undone, pain that can’t be removed, and are left to consider how best to move forward with grace and humanity.
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