swerve: australian desert noir

(2011. dir: Craig Lahiff) Swerve opens with a static, aerial shot of a three-tined, forked road, announcing its theme: one's Ineluctable Destiny. Why destiny, and not, say, the vagaries of fortune, which a three-tined road might easily connote? Something in the unblinking, unflinching way the camera stays put upon the image, and the unthinking, reckless way the tiny, dark car speeds forward along it, not toward the forks, but to the convergence.

We spend the next several minutes wordlessly with three separate drivers, all mad to reach some unknown destination, all headed straight for one another. Colin (David Lyons) we meet nursing his broken car at the roadside next to a sign gleefully advertising "the Neverest Hotel". The first words we hear are his: "give me a break," he mutters as he futzes with the radio, and that could be written on his tombstone. He's our hapless hero, not passive or weak, but a man absurdly, wonderfully honest in a dark, Faustian world. The second driver is speeding away from a violent drug deal with a suitcase full of colorful Australian money, and the third is Gina (Emma Booth), our femme fatale, going someplace fast, a place which never gets any more specific than "away from here".

One of the best things about this movie is that we never do settle just how fatale our femme is. Certainly she's out for herself, clever to a point of deviousness, used to bartering her sexuality for survival, battered to a point from which she can slip easily into a cold, near-sociopath state when forced into a corner. She's obviously not always telling the truth, but you can see she is when she looks sidelong at one of Colin's accusatory questions and says, "You won't believe me no matter what I say." Maybe this is what defines a femme fatale: a woman who trusts money over love and divorces her heart from her sexuality, using her charms as currency. Ultimately, perhaps, a woman who cannot trust a man, even our hero, whom we, from our privileged catbird seats, know without doubt is worth the extra effort. In the usual, noirish tradition, she's got a problematic husband (Jason Clarke as a corrupt cop and a wife-beater) and, once the instigating car-crash is done, there's that noir-necessary suitcase full of money to be chased and recovered and batted about, followed with shark-like tenacity by a cold-blooded assassin.

The most wonderful thing, and it is marvellous, is how Lahiff so often gives us unvoiced images to tell the story: a bathing suit abandoned at the bottom of a pool, a banknote used as a coaster and soaked with beer. It all ends with a return to the Neverest Hotel bar, and the barman telling that old tale about the Ineluctablity of Fate: the one about the guy who meets Death in Baghdad and runs away to Samara to avoid her. (Spoiler: it doesn't work.)