Review: Limbo (2023)
Also, some thoughts about the character of Tom Ripley, especially in "The American Friend" (1977).
Limbo (2023)
Written and directed by Ivan Sen
It should be clear to everyone that “film noir,” first identified by the critics at Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s as a body of Hollywood pictures that shared a number of stylistic and narrative traits, is now a flexible label that can be applied to color films, non-American productions, and even movies that don’t involve murder plots. Elaine May’s “Mikey and Nicky” (1977) is noir, as is the Coen brothers’ “Fargo” (2014), Akira Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well” (1960), and Wim Wenders’ “The American Friend” (1977). None of these focus on a heist or a murder investigation, none of them features a detective. But what they, and all movies that could be labeled noir, have in common is an atmosphere of moral decay.
In this atmosphere, something smells: some if not all the main characters have lost their way. If they could ever be depended upon to know right from wrong, they no longer can. And sometimes this moral blindness is as present in the movie’s protagonist or antihero as its villains.
How else to understand the character of Ripley as played by Dennis Hopper in “The American Friend”? As much as has been written about the character, created by Patricia Highsmith in five novels beginning with “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” despite the wide range of actors who have portrayed him over the years and the various plots he becomes wrapped up in, the one thing you can say about him is that his particular form of sociopathy allows him to carry out a variety of illegal schemes without remorse, and makes him able to kill with almost no hesitation when someone stands in his way or threatens to expose him. And that despite this trait, the murders themselves are never the point, but just a means to an end.
But if Ripley is the antihero in “The American Friend,” what can we say about Jonathan? As played by the brilliant Bruno Ganz, Jonathan begins the picture as a quiet man who owns a picture framing shop. After he insults Ripley at an art auction, Ripley pulls him into a criminal scheme to assassinate the enemy of a German mobster. Jonathan is vulnerable because he’s just learned that he has a type of lymphoma that will be fatal, though his doctor tells him he could still have years to live. After Jonathan falls into this trap, he seems to deteriorate both physically and spiritually. He has caught something of Hopper’s moral condition as if it were contagious. This is the same sickness and decay at the heart of film noir.
In “Limbo,” the main character is a cop, Travis (Simon Baker) who’s sent to a remote settlement — it would be exaggerating to call it a town — in the Australian outback, where he attempts, at first half-heartedly, to conduct a review of an old case. The setting, a pockmarked, picked-over former mining settlement, is an all-too-obvious metaphor for exhaustion and decay. The land has been burrowed into and hollowed out so extensively that its abandoned shafts and tunnels provide shelter for locals from the merciless sun.1 Children sit on piles of waste searching for castaway scraps of the opal that was mined there.
Like the land, the case that Travis has come to look into has little left that hasn’t already been extracted. A missing young Indigenous woman, Charlotte, disappeared one night. At first neither her brother Charlie (Rob Collins) or sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) nor other locals have much to say to Travis about the matter. This is partly because Travis is white and most of the locals are Indigenous. It’s also because the crime took place twenty years in the past, and the people who knew Charlotte have both forgotten the details and given up hope that the crime will ever be resolved.
Travis is equally world-weary, and a heroin addict to boot. He is professional enough to conduct the case review and honest enough with himself and the locals to tell them that whatever he finds out won’t necessarily lead to the case being reopened. He’s ready to leave after a couple of days, but his car breaks down and he’s stuck there waiting for a part, so he continues looking into the crime. There’s nothing else to do there.
The movie offers almost no exciting scenes, frustrating any viewer expecting a typical noir occurrence like a shot ringing out forcing the protagonist to take cover, or a sudden attack that hurls him into unconsciousness only to wake in the lair of the villain. There are no shots, no attacks, and no villains. Eventually a dying man admits that he and his brother (who is already dead, and thus a convenient person for everyone to blame for Charlotte’s death) were present at the scene of the crime, and apologises to her sister Emma for “what happened” without actually taking responsibility.
Despite the absence of typical noir scenes, this slow-moving film is consistently tense. Maybe it’s because you think, for most of the picture, that something is about to happen, even if it never does. I was alert to every movement, clue, and half-fact that Travis manages to drag out of the landscape and its inhabitants. Writer-director Sen — also the cinematographer, the editor, and the composer of the film’s soundtrack — knows how to frame a scene, and the actors form a fantastic ensemble.
This is a real place, called Coober Pedy, South Australia.