Synopsis

On an annual fishing trip, in isolated high country, Stewart, Carl, Rocco and Billy find a girl's body in the river. It's too late in the day for them to hike back to the road and report their tragic find. Next morning, instead of making the long trek back, they spend the day fishing. When the men finally return home to Jindabyne, and report finding the body, all hell breaks loose. Their wives can't understand how they could have gone fishing with the dead girl right there in the water. The men are confused, the girl was already dead, there was nothing they could do for her. Stewart's wife Claire is the last to know. As details filter out, and Stewart resists talking about what has happened, she is unnerved. There is a callousness about all of this which disturbs her deeply. Stewart is not convinced that he has done anything wrong. Claire's faith in her relationship with her husband is shaken to the core. As public opinion builds against the actions of the men, their certainty about themselves and the decision they made at the river is challenged. They can't undo what's happened. Only Claire understands, something fundamentaly wrong isn't being addressed.

What The Critics Say

"The film looks great with its vast arid landscape that stretches forever, surrounding the tucked away rural township of Jindabyne. There are long dusty roads that wind their way into unknown territory and hidden away is a little corner of heaven where the four men escape their lives and fish. There are many excellent things about the film, especially the mood it creates and the rich performances that explore intimate emotional issues. It doesn't matter that there are more questions than answers, but the film frustrates by the oomphy climax that never arrives." Louise Keller URBAN CINEFILE "With its subtle exploration of a community and the generally fine performances, this is a richly-textured film which, though it may not have the immediate impact of "Lantana", resonates with you for days and weeks after you’ve seen it. 4 1/2 STARS." David Stratton ABC AT THE MOVIES "The acclaimed director of Lantana and Bliss, Ray Lawrence brings a third haunting, beautifully wrought drama in Jindabyne. Stunning scenery and what must be heroic cinematography make an occasional under- or over-exposure or camera shake forgivable. The setting and an evocative soundtrack by Paul Kelly complete the whole in a sublimely beautiful film." Avril Carruthers IN FILM "The socio-political argument eventually begins to weigh down the film, as does the soundtrack's over-reliance on the wordless vocals of Aussie troubadour Paul Kelly. Mood aplenty is conjured up by the watchful nature of the untamed terrain and far horizons, handsomely photographed by longtime Lawrence collaborator David Williamson, and by the director's measured pacing." Megan Lehmann THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"In true Australian cinema tradition, landscape is character in "Jindabyne," though the combined contributions of lenser David Williamson, composers Paul Kelly and Dan Lunscombe, sound man Andrew Plain and editor Karl Sodersten are somewhat short of great Oz mood-setters, including "Lantana" itself and current Cannes contender, Rolf de Heer's "Ten Canoes." Pic is finally burdened with far too much incidents and themes for it to do justice to any of them individually. The story surrounding Caylin's mom-by-adoption Jude (a strong, spiky Deborra-lee Furness), an emotionally fractured woman who alone, deserves its own movie." Robert Koehler VARIETY "I have qualms about some elements of the story and funnily enough some of the performances from the supporting characters. But generally the performances of all the leads are just so fine. But I feel that there is just some glue in this story that isn't quite there to bring everything together, but apart from that, I think it's another stunning achievement in a good year for Australian film. 4 STARS." Margaret Pomeranz ABC AT THE MOVIES "As he did with Bliss (1985) and Lantana (2001), Lawrence uses the story as a lever to prise open the lid into love and relationships. It is another unflinching look into the spaces in between the sexes - no stone is left unturned by he and screenwriter Beatrix Christian, including the issue of race and racism as it smoulders beneath white Australia." TRIPLE J MOVIE REVIEWS "Technically excellent in every department, the film tells the story with great verve and at a well judged pace, but the strong emotional content seems to stay on the screen, without translating to the deeply moving experience we hanker for. It's as if making this a thriller isn't enough and the laboured socio-political theme introduced near the end kidnaps the film's original mood." Andrew L Urban URBAN CINEFILE

The Inside Story Monday 18th April 2005. It’s 3pm on the 34th day of the Jindabyne film shoot. Ray Lawrence, the director, and Beatrix Christian, the writer, sit at a table in Ray’s hotel room at Crackenback Resort. Ray pours vodka into glasses. Slides one across to Bea. Ray’s little black notebook, with his storyboard sketches, is open on the table in front of them. The pair are thrashing out the end of the film. Not the final moment (that's sorted) but the second-to-last scene, dubbed by them, the 'smoking scene'. One of the most expensive days in the shoot is going disastrously wrong. And that the 'smoking scene', as scripted, as currently being discussed, may never be shot. One day, back when Ray was a kid, his dad said something he’s never forgotten. "Always make it look easy". That phrase stuck in his mind. And those few simple words frame his life. Frame his work. Back then his dad would take him to the cinema four or five times a week. I think the kid wants to go out, his dad would say to his mother. It was his dad who wanted to get out but Ray didn’t mind going along. In those days the movies rolled on, one after the other. You could sit in the cinema for hours. Sometimes Ray would fall asleep, nestled in next to his dad, and wake up in the middle of a movie, but he’d always be able to catch it up later in the day. On the weekends his grandfather took him to the movies too. So he was seeing five, maybe six, movies a week. After each movie he’d come home and act out scenes standing on top of the bed. He’d whip off his pyjama cord, flick it in front of him and pretend to be Tony Curtis in The Vikings. The shortened version. The seven-year-old Ray Lawrence version. When Ray was older he realised that recreating stories wasn’t always going to be so easy but a sense of play remained important. And making it look easy remained important too. It was the heady eighties when the musician and songwriter, Paul Kelly, first got Ray Lawrence interested in Raymond Carver’s writing. The film "Bliss" had been made (written by Peter Carey and Ray Lawrence from Carey’s novel, Bliss) and had screened in Competition at Cannes in 1985. That same year the film had taken out awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Film at the Australian Film Institute Awards, and had been nominated in ten other categories. Producers kept asking Ray for project ideas. Ray couldn’t stop thinking about one Carver story in particular, "So Much Water So Close to Home". But he couldn’t get anyone interested in backing the film. So he continued making commercials, working with Catherine Jarman as producer, telling her all about the story he would one day make about four fishermen who go on a fishing trip to the mountains, find a dead body in the river, and decide to keep on fishing. Then one night, in the late nineties, Ray watched a play in a darkened theatre. It was called The Governor’s Family. Something in the language (poetic, but in a way that gave ordinary words a shine) captured his imagination. The playwright was Beatrix Christian. Ray gave Bea the Carver story to read. Bea was already a fan of Carver’s writing. She went home, curled up on her couch, and reread So Much Water So Close to Home. She found herself curious about the men. What happened at the river? But she was less pleased with the female character, Claire. The Carver story "So Much Water So Close to Home" is imbued with an atmosphere of sexual violence heightened by Claire’s fears about what her husband might have done at the river. But Bea and Ray wanted Claire to question her own choices, as well as her husband’s. They discussed changes to the story and both thought that Claire’s isolation seemed unnatural in the contemporary context of a small town. Perhaps they could internalise her isolation? They wanted her to have a job and friends. Bea knew that to write this screenplay she had to make Claire a character she could relate to. A woman with her own dark side. Early in 2003 Bea and Ray went on a trip to Jindabyne. It was a six-hour drive. A few hours in Bea felt frazzled. She was stuck in a car with a director she didn’t know all that well, and who, worse yet, didn’t smoke, talking about a project she wasn’t sure she could write. When she stepped into her hotel room at Crackenback she couldn’t get to those cigarettes quick enough. She’d only had two puffs when there was a knock on her door. It was Ray. He was full of chatter. He wanted to go exploring. They drove out of town and ended up on a lonely dirt road, somewhere on the plains, not far from Dalgety. They stepped out of the car and walked up the road. The wind howled around them. The sky was overwhelming. Mesmerising. The land seemed to go on forever. Bea tried to imagine Claire standing there and suddenly she felt a connection. Instinct told her she could write this screenplay. Ray, who had been sitting with the story for twenty years, who had fished in rivers summer after summer, imagining what it might be like to find a body floating in the water, could see the film unfolding already. He could see the opening sequence taking place right there on the plain. What They Had To Say "I ran into Paul Kelly. We had common interests. We didn’t become fast friends then, just interested in similar things. I started to tell him about the story, and he introduced me to the writings of Raymond Carver. One of these stories was "So Much Water, So Close to Home", which had at its heart the most fantastic moral dilemma. I thought maybe that would be better than the one I was planning. That was almost 20 years ago." Director Ray Lawrence
"In our film, when Gregory comes out and kills, people suddenly become haunted by the future. And that creates the imperative for them to deal with some of the things that have risen up from the past. The girl’s body being found in the river is a beautiful but terrible image of something rising to the surface emotionally for the men." Screenwriter Beatrix Christian
"Anthony LaPaglia called me on the phone and said there’s a script coming your way that a really great director is doing and you should do it. And I listened to Anthony. So, I kept an eye out for it. It arrived. I read it, loved it, of course." Laura Linney
"I’d seen Lantana and I knew that he would make something really interesting. This is a film that makes you think about your life. I remember Ray saying to me, ‘I think you should do this film. It would be really nice if you came to Australia and did it. It would be a work experience but I think it would be an important spiritual experience for you.’ That is what stuck with me. Nobody has ever said that to me before as a reason to do a film." Gabriel Byrne
"She comes across on the page as sort of grumpy, and she’s mean to her granddaughter, but it’s like anything, when you understand where someone is coming from, you get them. I love her strength to battle on, to fight through what she’s got to get through to come out the other side. There’s no handbook on how to deal with grief. When you’re suffering, you just have to go through it. She has incredible loyalty to her husband, they’re a great team, and as I see her, she’s a matriarch." Deborra-lee Furness
"He guides it beautifully. It’s his movie, through and through. But he lets everyone do what it is they know how to do, and then he braids it together in this fabulous creation. The entire movie is one take, and I’ve worked on movies before that are one take, but not an entire film." Laura Linney
"Ray doesn’t give much direction. He doesn’t even say action. I’ve never worked with a director who never said action before, and he usually talks about the scene after it’s over. So, yes, it’s scary. Ray thinks unlike any other director I’ve ever worked with, he shoots like no director I’ve ever worked with and his vision is unique to him." Gabriel Byrne
"He’s a shambling, pot-bellied man, of generally good humour, who drinks too much. He hasn’t properly dealt with his daughter’s death. Carl is not necessarily a particularly philosophical person, nor a deep thinker, although every now and then he unwittingly comes out with very wise things." John Howard
"Carmel is a city girl. I think she opted to go to the bush where there was a strong Aboriginal community. She’s never denied her aboriginality, she’s always aware of it, she’s always proud of it, but she just didn’t know how to connect to it. She’s a strong woman, a professional, she’s gone to university to be a teacher. At the same time, she’s fighting with her own demons." Leah Purcell
"I have been a working actress since I was sixteen, but you are never sure of yourself. No matter how old you get, you think, 'Can I do it? Will I be able to do what he wants?' We talked a little bit about my character, but not much. I eventually got a phone call from Ray. He said, 'Betty, you have a natural sweetness. I want your character to have steel inside.' He just said those words." Betty Lucas
"Ray was just really kind and funny. He gave me a spider because I really love spiders because I know a lot about them. I’ve read nearly all the books on spiders in the Melbourne library. In some ways I feel sorry for Ray. He’s got a really big job, dealing with this and dealing with that. It would be really tiring for him to just sit there all day, staring at the screen. Just imagine sitting down and just staring at one plant for, like, two minutes then getting up for one second and saying, 'Next time can you do this?' and getting back in this little box thing, and sitting down and staring at it for two minutes. So, yeah, I feel sorry for him. And I don’t feel sorry for him in a way, because he can explain well and that would make it easier. I think he’s just one of the best directors." seven-year-old Sean Rees-Wemyss
"I’ve never seen a sky that felt so much like a dome. I’ve never seen a landscape that was so vast. Vast! We have Montana and Wyoming in the United States, but nothing like Jindabyne. Being in a country that is so large .. there’s this wonderful power to the nature and the beauty of the landscape." Laura Linney
The Verdict "A powerful and emotive journey set in the midst of our southern highlands. It should have been the biggest Australian drama since Lawrences "Lantana", but somehow, despite all their effort and all their care, "Jindabyne" manages to lose itself in the final act. Never the less, even with its short-comings it is a beautiful film with a strong and convincing cast led by Laura Linney who is every bit as good as she was in "Mystic River". Highly Recommended. 4 STARS." Cast & Crew Bytes "JINDABYNE" stars .......
Gabriel Byrne ["When Bredan Met Trudy", "Stigmata", "Assault On Precinct 13" and "Wah-Wah"]; Laura Linney ["The Mothman Prophecies", "Mystic Rivers", "Kinsey", "P.S." and "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"]; AFI Award winner Deborra-lee Furness ["Jenny Kissed Me", "Waiting", "A Matter of Convenience", "Angel Baby" and "Shame"]; Variety Club of Australia Heart Award winner John Howard ["Japanese Story", "The Man Who Sued God" and "A Man’s Gotta Do"], Independent Filmmaker Award winner Leah Purcell ["Lanatana", "Somersault" and "The Proposition"] and Three time AFI Award winner & Three time LOGIE Award winner Chris Haywood ["Breaker Morant", "Muriel’s Wedding", "Oscar and Lucinda" and "The Cars that Ate Paris"] as Gregory.
"JINDABYNE" was .......
directed by Two time AFI Award winner Ray Lawrence ["Bliss" and "Lantana"]; screenplay by Sydney Theatre Critics Circle Award Beatrix Christian ["Spumante Romantica" and "Blue Murder"]; original story "So Much Water So Close to Home" by Raymond Carver ["Autumn of the Leaves", "Cathedral" and "Everything Goes"]; director of photography by David Williamson ["The Matrix", "Peter Pan", "Muriel’s Wedding" and "Bliss"]; original music by Paul Kelly ["The Big House", "One Night The Moon", "Lantana" and "Silent Partner"]; production & costume design by 2005 AFI Award winner Margot Wilson ["The Thin Red Line", "Japanese Story" and "The Proposition"]; produced by Catherine Jarman ["Bliss" and "Lantana"]. Run Time 123 minutes Rated M [AUST] Copyright ©2006 - April Films - All Rights Reserved Copyright Protected © 2006 - The Movie Pages & Impact Internet Services - All Rights Reserved