There's an urgent question that's slightly sidelined in the new Australian film Hearts and Bones — it involves the ethics of representation, and whether an outsider has the right to depict someone else's trauma.
Specifically, if a white photographer travels to an African country and takes pictures of war crimes, do the subjects of his photos have a right to object to their dissemination?
To take this dilemma through its paces, debut feature director Ben Lawrence, working with co-writer Beatrix Christian (who scripted Foxtel's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Jindabyne for Lawrence's father Ray), tells the story of a war photographer named Dan (Hugo Weaving) whose self-reliance begins to show deep structural fractures.
He's just returned from an overseas assignment intent on an exhibition of his work, when he receives a one-two punch of unexpected news. His partner is pregnant — a development that uncovers barely healed wounds in their relationship — and a South Sudanese cab driver turns up at his front door, asking him to withdraw a photo of a village massacre from the upcoming show.
This encounter is the start of an unlikely friendship between the two men, who both share common ground as witnesses to atrocities that have sent them into states of long-term shock.
That said, Weaving plays Dan with the same stoicism that made him a convincing Tolkienian Elf and Matrix villain, so his character is in denial about suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, and his bouts of anxiety and despair terrify him.
The cab driver, Sebastian (played by excellent newcomer Andrew Luri) seems more self-aware. He runs a refugee choir at a local church hall as a kind of therapy session for fellow trauma survivors. He gets Dan to join them, with some incessant, softly spoken badgering.
The friendship proves mutually beneficial, but as the exhibition nears, the issue of the photo comes between them.
A bit like the recently released thriller Slam — in which an Arab Muslim man is forced to reassess his place in white middle-class society when his activist sister goes missing — Hearts and Bones is set in inner-Sydney suburbia where different classes and ethnicities live side by side.
Each man's home is an expression of their very different circumstances and status: Dan's spartan, chic 19th-century warehouse space is a stark contrast to Sebastian's 70s walk-up brick flat.
Expand the frame and the partners of both men (Hayley McElhinney and Bolude Watson) are well-drawn women who demand accountability and action from their respective partners. They are, in some way, mirrors of each other: both are pregnant and both support their husband's claim over the contentious photo.
A tense meeting between them is one of the film's defining moments, with Watson's character calling out the tone-deaf privilege of Dan and his wife.
It is thematic terrain that would be complex for a veteran director, let alone a debut filmmaker stepping up from documentary (Lawrence's last film was the compelling urban-legend character piece, Ghosthunter).
Working with editor Phillip Horn and cinematographer Hugh Miller, the director's polished visual style tends towards more composed frames with a hint of handheld movement — perhaps unsurprisingly, given he's also an acclaimed photographer.
The unobtrusive approach complements a slightly brooding doco realism, but the film is less successful imbuing collective scenes with a sense of life and interpersonal chemistry.
The central friendship, in particular, never quite convinces.
The film feels a little stilted, perhaps afraid to take a wrong step. Given the way cross-cultural buddy movies like Green Book or The Upside (a remake of the French film The Intouchables) play some pretty saccharine and even cheesy notes, the restraint is understandable. But the bond between the men is seldom palpable, and the potential — comic or otherwise — of a middle-class white guy hanging out with a mostly black refugee choir remains underexplored.
Even allowing for the film's more serious intentions, Weaving's character feels slightly underwritten — curiously undermotivated for a man who's spent two decades travelling the world documenting the worst of humanity to raise the consciousness of folks back home.
In a film where everyone else has a strong opinion of his work, his lack of passion is perhaps a sign he's trapped in his own mental fog, but it also suggests the film's focus is elsewhere.
Sure enough, when Dan does find a clear motivation, it's in coming to Sebastian's rescue.
The cab driver has an unexpected transition in the film, from sympathetic victim to something much more complex, and darker. This fleshing out is laudable, but certain revelations about him come close to inadvertently echoing xenophobic tropes of refugees as duplicitous figures with ulterior motives.
What becomes clear is that the film is less interested in the ethics of representation and more interested in the redemptive power of art.
Weaving's patrician aura — even when he's roughed up and bleeding by the end — radiates like a halo.
The film's examination of race and class mellows, ultimately, to embrace a more comforting idea about how art — and artists — can play a positive role in healing. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but the film doesn't really sell the unexpected, upbeat takeaway.
With a more credible emotional core to the on-screen friendship, an audience might have followed the story anywhere.
Lawrence does get some impressive results from his mixed professional and semi-professional cast, but his film's final tilt towards optimism is trickier than it seems, perhaps harder to pull off than a more strident critique, and it needed a firmer foundation.
Hearts and Bones is available to stream now.
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2020-05-07 00:20:10Z
CAIiEDjEgVMED2MV7JpgKoVRoVQqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDc2g4
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