(courtesy IMDb)
Taglines on film posters are often quite pithy, one sentence sneak peeks into what a film has to offer, and while they often do that job briefly and intriguingly well, you’d be hard pressed, most of time to attribute any real weight to them.
They are disposable marketing flotsam and jetsam, easily forgotten but in the case of Damage, from Australian writer-director Madeleine Blackwell, that’s turned on its head with the film’s elevator pitch, “She can’t remember. He can’t forget” carrying an intense amount of emotional weight in it.
So much in fact that as this beautifully nuanced and quietly realised film hits its stride, you are seized by the sudden realisation that the tagline in this instance is the very heart and soul of a story that not only captures modern Australian society in its flawed glory, but what it is like to have the life you knew, and loved, taken from you and to have no real way to get it back.
Even more sadly, to be plunged into a society which has forgotten kindness, compassion and any form of compassion, and which almost mocks you for trying to build something new in the ashes of the old.
Ali Al Saidi – played by real Iraqi asylum seeker Ali Al Jenabi; both he and his elderly passenger, Esther Brown (Imelda Bourke) are non-actors who deliver superlatively good performances – is a man who has lost his family, his home in Iraq, his ability to support himself and untroubled mental health.
When he picks up Esther in the darkness of an Adelaide night, he is in his first week of driving a cab, a job choice borne of necessity which he is clearly finding trying, largely because the man who has given him the gig is proving evasive about what driving the taxi involves and who insists on things Ali seem a unnecessary from a business perspective like getting the car washed.
Alis clearly an intelligent, insightful who, the film suggests in small, quiet ways here and there, is far more talented and experienced than his current gig allows for, but needs must and all that and so he drives a cab as a way of getting some income in (thought it is FAR from lucrative and Ali scornfully laughs about the pittance he will bring in).
Resentful and frustrated, Ali isn’t exactly in a warm and hospitable frame of mind when Esther gets in the taxi, and his mood doesn’t improve when it turns out that the snappy elderly woman has forgotten why she got in the cab in the first place and where she wants to go.
She troubled by it, and you ache for Ali to extend her some compassion, but it becomes very clear very quickly that here are two people caught in prisons not of their making and their combative sadness has less to do with the person they are sharing a taxi with and a great deal to do with a deep-seated, corrosive sadness about where life has taken them.
While their lives couldn’t be more different – Ali is a Muslim asylum seeker grievously carrying the mental and emotional wounds of sedition and war while Esther is an elderly Christian woman who longs for the way things once were – the two form a touching bond over the course of one transformative night.
A film that luxuriates in sparse, emotional-filled conversations that go from combative to warmly understanding, especially after moving incident at a carwash that helps the two to see each other in a whole new light, Damage is poetically rich and beautiful, happy to linger in quiet but emotionally intense moments and to let the full import of a scene really sink in.
But while it is reflectively meditational, happy to let the world slip by as Ali drives around Adelaide trying to jog Esther’s memory, Damage is also willing to lay it all out in ways that leave no room for wondering what it is trying to say or what pain and loss is driving (quite literally, of course) Esther and Ali on this one fateful night.
There is one particular scene that stands out in this regard.
Fresh from the incident at the carwash, Ali ruefully laughs when Esther asks him why he’s in Australia and why he just didn’t stay in his home country. (It’s not as confrontational at it sounds; at this later stage of their nascent friendship, such as it is, Esther is more curious than anything.)
He remarks, almost in a mocking tone, that its ironic that the West came to his country and “created hell” before turning around and punishing Ali and his country people for trying to escape a hell not of his making.
It’s a savage indictment of the sadly increasing anti-asylum seeker and refugee rhetoric of many Western countries such as Australia, which Blackwell observes in an interview carried on In Review, has “become very cold and hostile towards refugees and there’s been a lot of propaganda against them.”
By placing Ali and Esther, who “doesn’t like Arabic people … doesn’t like Muslims”, into the same confined space on one night where things hang in the balance for both of them, Damage gives us a revelatory microcosm of life in Australia today; more than that though, it allows us to see what might happen if people dropped their assumptions and actually worked to understand each other.
It’s not an easy journey of understanding to undertake, and it’s certainly not one that either Esther or Ali have any appetite for when circumstances place them in the same cab together, but it’s a journey they end up going on anyway, and while there’s not exactly a happily-ever-after, lightbulb moment of resolution at the end of the film, it does mean that, for these two people at least, life shifts on its broken axis just a little.
While Damage is not a perfect film with perhaps a few too many pregnant pauses and lingering cinematic shots of the surrounding urban landscape, it does an affectingly rich job of taking us into the lives of two wildly different people and helping each of them, and us in turn, to see the other as less of an assumption and more of an actual person and to allow them to journey, literally and metaphorically, to a place where life isn’t any better than it was at the start of the night, but they are enriched by getting to know the other, quietly meaningful revelation that may yet make a profound difference in both their lives.