The Tracker

Whilst being a commendable film, The Tracker is not as good, in my opinion as two immediately preceding offerings dealing with Aboriginals in white Australian society, Beneath Clouds and Rabbit Proof Fence, for stylistically it's a rather traditional exercise, recalling the glory days of 1970s Australian film with its taste for neatly-drawn heroes and villains and the creation of modern Australian history/mythos.

The story concerns the pursuit by three white men (The Fanatic, The Follower and The Veteran), guided by an experienced aboriginal tracker, of an indigenous man accused of murdering a white woman. The film feels somewhat like it's a visualisation of a Patrick White novel (which is a credit to de Heer, given that he was writer-director) and the natural flow of events is interspersed with stills of Sidney Nolan-like paintings (although the filmed landscape, tended to look in turns like Hans Heysen or Fred Williams). The striking contemporary songs, written by Graham Tardif and sung by Archie Roach, which feature prominently in the film, reinforce this mythicising tendency, dealing as they do, with big issues - justice, freedom, Aboriginality and so on.

Yet for all its apparent allusions, there is a split between the isolation of the events as we see and the wider social and historical context. The events we see begin and end "somewhere in Australia" and though the Gary Sweet character, The Fanatic, by his own assertions, seems to be a bounty hunter hired by "The Government", there is no attempt to contextualize the hunt (giving the film, which is set in 1922, a rather anachronistic 19th century-through-the-1970s-feel). Equally, the film's title has a tag line - "All men choose the path they walk" - yet this also seems disconnected from what we see, if not outright contradictory, with the arguable exception of The Fanatic".

Gary Sweet, whose usual terrain is the small screen, in a role which a generation ago would have gone to Ray Barrett, does not really bring off his supposed character - yes he's a bully, but he does not have the tightly coiled energy of a fanatic (and de Heer gives him some inconsistently reflective dialogue, memorably his final soliloquy). David Gulpilil, however, is terrific as The Tracker, although for my money de Heer overdoes his character's wry fatalism. Criticism aside, however, there is much to commended here (the shooting of it alone must have been an arduous affair for all concerned), slow-moving, but well worth seeing on the big screen if you have the chance.

 

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