Cactus: (2008. dir: Jasmine Yuen Carrucan) Kathryn-Bigelow-style, Carrucan makes her debut in the director's chair helming an all-out boy-movie, one she wrote herself, and doing it well. She launches us straight into the action: we're in an alley, close behind a half-naked man being forced at gunpoint, panting and wordless, into a car. The car is great, an old red Torino, probably from the '70s, and we spend the bulk of the film inside it as kidnapper drives hostage across Australia to a vague delivery point. Carrucan started behind the camera (Kill Bill, the Last Samurai) and you can see it. This camera has a great way of dollying up behind the car in the beginning, then, toward the end, as the action fades into denouement, we dolly back out from the two men, one broken, the other perhaps reborn. It leaves a wonderful sense of having been allowed a short glimpse, by unseen gods, possibly as a moral fable.
Still, true to the feeling of those old gearhead existentialist films from the turn of the '70s, although we come to know something about both men, we never get a strong hold on details, as that would be superfluous in an absurd, Camusian universe. We never really meet the wife and daughter of the kidnapper, although we see them in his haunted visions. Although both men are driven toward simple, opposing goals (one to make the delivery, the other to escape it), there is a feeling of Godot in the proceedings, as if the endless stretch of road were wound in a tight circle and the notion of progress was a trick from the subconscious, like God is, or mercy.
And just as the two men, these two opposites, are finally about to meet in understanding, Nemesis, not Fate, steps in to make the clinching decision.
the Rover: (2014. dir: David Michod) On the other hand, the universe of the Rover makes cold, logical, ruthless sense. In this mesmeric, post-apocalyptic dream, the choices you make have consequences; the consequences just don't always come from the outside. A man in this world might easily be his own worst enemy, his inner conflict bringing a plague down on the heads of all around him until he clears himself with his own, internal gods.
It's not directed by a woman, but the DP is the Argentine Natasha Braier (cinematographer for 2007's extraordinary In the City of Sylvia), and it's largely due to her that this one is great as it is. It makes the whole of Australia look like the scrubbiest part of the Mojave, the part you fly past on the Bakersfield-Barstow Highway, but there's beauty in the way the camera looks at it. This "post-collapse" world has a cohesion to it. Things are crumbling uniformly, guns are more plentiful than food, and you pay for everything with American dollars. Shelters are jerry-rigged and fortified, women are scarce, men are losing their souls. Braier's camera is both steady and unobtrusive, and the way it lingers, unwavering, allows for brilliance from these actors. You knew Guy Pearce was going to be brilliant, right? and he is; the revelation is Robert Pattinson, utterly heartbreaking as the twitchy, watchful man-child, Rey.
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