Written by Beatrix Christian
Directed by Ray Lawrence
Rated M
Opens July 20

Jindabyne is an Australian film worth celebrating for its normalcy. It doesn't try to dress itself up in, or hide behind, nouveau film techniques. The formula is really quite simple — a good story, executed beautifully.

Jindabyne has been almost 20 years in gestation. It's uncanny that of the relatively few Australian films released in the past few years, Jindabyne marks the second film set in this town and this uncharacteristic part of the Australian landscape after the 2004 release, Sommersault.

Demonstrating the potency of the narrative at the centre of this film, Melbourne singer and songwriter Paul Kelly gave Lawrence a copy of the story So Much Water, So Close to Home by Raymond Carver. In 1989, Kelly himself, who has written the film's score, released an album inspired by the same story on which Jindabyne is based.

On an ritualistic, fiercely protected 'men only', fishing trip deep in the high country, Stewart, Carl, Rocco and Billy find a girl's body in the river. For reasons none of them can adequately explain or defend, rather than cut their fishing trip short they wait a day and a half before reporting their discovery. Upon arrival home, their wives struggle with their husbands' apparent callousness, the town turns on them and eventually, they turn on each other.

This disintegration is primarily played out in the marriage of Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and Claire (Laura Linney). Old memories are rehashed and their collective worlds splinter.

Writer Beatrix Christian says Jindabyne is a ghost story. "Everybody in the film is haunted by something." Matters are further complicated by the female victim's Aboriginality and suddenly you have a community, and a film, tearing itself apart along lines of gender and colour.

Jindabyne opens with the scene of the young girl's murder and it's a testament to the strength of the film that it can sustain the viewer's interest when we know from the outset the identity of the real criminal at work. But even then, Jindabyne isn't interested in those kinds of questions.

At the heart of the film is the most fantastic moral dilemma. As the viewer, your mind travels at high speed, trying to process where your loyalties lie, as if the film is castigating you — What would you have done? Jindabyne throws up more ethical questions and quagmires for the viewer than they, most probably, are able to succinctly process in two hours. This is a film that will wash over you long after you leave the cinema.

When he's not making films, and he's only made two — Bliss in 1985 and Lantana in 2001 — Lawrence makes commercials. Perhaps this is why his films capture such a good grasp of the everyday, of what he calls "confirmation." Lawrence only works with natural light and the entire film is one take.

"It's okay to be human," says Lawrence. He says that's the main thing he wants viewers to take away from the film. "You look at some of the magazines, and some of the shows, and some of the products you see - not very average is it? It's hard to feel sympathy for somebody who gets out of a Porsche." 

Fantastic performances, particularly by Byrne and Linney, are delivered by all in what is truly an ensemble cast. Debora-Lee Furness is a wonderful surprise.

Jindabyne is the best of a bunch of Aussie films to have hit our screens in the past year.