Jindabyne

Tonight I went and saw a movie called Jindabyne. It was an Aussie movie but for a while it was hard to tell because I saw Gabriel Byrne, I shouted, "What! An Irish movie! I thought this was an Aussie movie!" Audience members told me to pipe down. Then Laura Linney comes on so I yelled, "What! Is it Irish, Aussie, or American this movie?! What what what?!" Audience members threw their Jaffas at my head and it stung. But anyway, those are the only two foreigners, the rest are a solid true blue fair dinkum Aussie cast, mate.
In the movie, Gabriel Byrne and his three mates go on a fishing trip into a hard-to-reach river in the Snowy Mountains. Before they even really get down to business Gabriel comes across the almost-naked body of a girl in the water. After Gabriel freaks out and calls his mates, they have a meeting and decide to fish on, the logic being that the girl is dead, they can't do anything for her anyway. They hiked a long way from their jeep to go fishing, plus one of the mates twisted his ankle. So what they do is just tie her ankle to a log so she won't get carried away by the river then they have a fun two days fishing. But when their fishing trip is over and they at last call the police to report the body, the policeman tells them they oughtta be ashamed of themselves. To complicate matters, the girl was Aboriginal so that turns it into a race issue.
But what about the girl? How did she die? Who killed her? It's no mystery because that is shown right at the beginning, at least who killed her. But the focus of the movie is not who killed her but that these selfish fishermen didn't want to let a dead body ruin their fishing fun.
With a (semi) naked girl's body lying around the whole movie while people go about their lives, it reminded me of the 1986 movie River's Edge, but Jindabyne is actually based on a Raymond Carver short story So Much Water, So Close To Home.
Another problem is that when Gabriel gets home to his wife Laura he doesn't say anything straight away about the body, but wakes her up and seems hotter than usual for her, so when she later finds out about the body they found, and that it was a semi-naked girl, she accuses him of being turned on by it. Woah. Heavy, man. Yet one of the scenes where Gabriel pays a midnight visit to the girl in the river seems to lend weight to this theory. Well, you watch the movie and you decide.

[For some reason Blogger is not letting me upload a frigging picture to this review.]