Joe Cinque's Consolation

Synopsis: In 1997, law student Anu Singh (Maggie Naouri) meets and begins a relationship with young engineer Joe Cinque (Jerome Meyer) but soon her mental health begins to deteriorate and she becomes convinced that she is dying and that Joe is somehow responsible. As her condition worsens, she increasingly speaks of taking her own life while also not wishing to die alone. These ideas soon become more than just threats as Anu enlists the help of her friend Madhavi Rao (Sacha Joseph) to put into motion a deadly and shocking plan.

This film adaptation by Sotiris Dounoukos and Matt Rubinstein is based on Helen Garner's 2004 multi-award-winning book “Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law” which detailed the circumstances of this shocking and disturbing true crime story.Its focus is primarily on Anu as a character and her rapid disintegration into paranoid fantasy and obsession. It’s a great performance by Naouri who is chilling in her representation of a young woman who seems to live by lies in a world of her own fabrication. Equally unsettling is Joseph’s performance as Anu’s needy and sycophantic friend Madhavi who is so willingly drawn into the macabre plan. Sitting outside the dark cloud that shrouds these two women is Joe, a nicely pitched innocent, if not gullible, performance by Meyer that makes us want to scream at him, as his friend Chris almost does, to get out while he can. It’s a perfect storm of three dangerous personalities that come together in a gruesomely tragic way.

What we miss, though, is any real backstory for these three characters. The closest we come is a visit to Joe’s parents (solid performances by Gia Carides and Tony Nikolakopoulos) but even this scene serves Anu’s character more than it does Joe’s backstory. In the absence of any motivating factors, we’re left to accept the characters on face value which, given the extreme actions that form the core of the story, is a weakness in the screenplay.

Stylistically, the film plays more like a telemovie than a big screen feature. It sets out the information for us in a matter of fact manner that, were the material not so shocking, might feel more mundane than it does. It’s no Snowtown but it’s still a riveting story that, if it was not true, would seem beyond belief, its telling through three compelling performances ensuring that we just can’t manage to look away even if we want to.

The rest of the cast are uniformly effective, especially Jackson Tozer as Anu’s friend Len, Josh McConville as Joe’s friend Chris and Laura Gordon as Tanya, the only one in the circle to take any action when she realises what Anu has in mind. In fact, these orbiting characters; the friends who attend the ‘farewell’ dinner party and seem unmoved (or even strangely admiring) of Anu’s so-called suicide pact with Joe give the story a broader impact than the crime itself. Their disconnection from what is happening and, with the exception of Tanya, their failure to question or intervene is as enabling of Anu as Madhavi’s blind assistance. One hopes this slightly sociopathic behaviour is limited to this group of Canberra friends and not indicative of a generation.

 

 

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