Sweet Country (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Sweet Country (2017) – W. Thornton

Australian Western taking place in the 1920s around Alice Springs at a time when relations between whitefellas and blackfellas was particularly bad.  Ewen Leslie plays a WWI vet who moves to the Outback to take over a station and starts causing trouble with his hard-drinking and negative approach to the Indigenous people (in contrast to the more equal treatment advocated by Sam Neill’s missionary).  Soon, Leslie has been killed by Hamilton Morris in an act of self-defence and Bryan Brown’s constable is sent to track him down (and his wife, Natassia Gorey Furber), with the assistance of Gibson John, an Indigenous man expected to track outside of his own country.  Director Warwick Thornton uses this plot (from screenwriter David Tranter) to interrogate Australian attitudes toward Indigenous people and the unequal application of the law.  In other words, the European colonists want one version of justice for themselves but apply another version (frontier justice) to the Aboriginal people.  It isn’t too far a leap to suggest that this same double standard is still applied today – so this is an important message to contemplate.  Thornton himself is a Kaytej man from Alice Springs and the film employed a large number of local Indigenous people both in front of and behind the camera (Thornton and his son Dylan River worked together as cinematographers and the film looks beautiful). It is excellent that there is an Indigenous voice (or voices) in film. Unfortunately, the “sweet” in the title may be meant ironically.