The Japanese in Contemporary Australian Screen Stories

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

“Telling” the Japanese in Contemporary Australian Screen Stories

by Cory Taylor B.A. (Hons.)

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Film and Television, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT in 2006

KEYWORDS

Japanese, Australian, screenwriting, representation, stereotypes,

Orientalism, film, cinema, narrative, whiteness, multiculturalism,

identity, ethnicity, Clara Law, John Doyle, Mike Leigh,

Changi, Heaven’s Burning, The Goddess of 1967, Japanese Story,

Secrets and Lies.

STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP

The work contained in this thesis has not previously been submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature ______

Date ______

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I wish to thank my supervisors, John Hookham and Cheryl Stock for their generous help and advice throughout this study.

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. They insulate

us from our real emotions. As Proust himself put it, we are all in the

habit of ‘giving to what we feel a form of expression which differs so

much from, and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be

reality itself ’. This leads to a substitution of conventional feelings for

real ones.

Christopher Lehman-Haupt (quoted in Bogart, 2001, p. 91)

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the challenges facing screenwriters in Australia who set out to represent the Japanese on screen. The study is presented in two parts; an exegesis and a creative practice component consisting of two full length feature film screenplays. The exegesis explores how certain screenwriting conventions have constrained recent screen images of the Japanese within the bounds of the cliched and stereotypical, and argues for a greater resistance to these conventions in the future. The two screenplays experiment with new ways of representing the Japanese in mainstream Australian film and aim to expand the repertoire of Asian images in the national film culture.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE SCREENPLAYS: SYNOPSES…………………………………… vi

THE EXEGESIS: SYNOPSIS…………………………………………….vii

PREFACE: PROJECT BACKGROUND……………………………… viii

1. Introduction: Lovely Corpses………………………………………… 2

2. Aso and Yukio: Typical Japanese Savages…………………… …….11

3. Sam Nakadai: Criminality Comes Home……………………………34

(It is proposed that the screenplay My Australian Life be read here)

3. J.M. and Hiro: The Japanese as Tourist…………………………… 41

5. Setsuko Forrester: The Japanese as Traveller……………………….71

(It is proposed that the screenplay The Rushworth War be read here)

6. Living Bodies……………………………………………………………80

7. Conclusion……………………………………………………………….91

LIST OF REFERENCES…………………………………………………...97

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THE SCREENPLAYS: SYNOPSES

My Australian Life tells the story of a retired Japanese businessman who, having migrated to the Gold Coast in the late eighties, now lives there with his Australian wife and their two adult children. A series of tragic mishaps sees his comfortable lifestyle utterly transformed until he winds up in prison for attempted extortion. My Australian Life is a black comedy intended to disclose some of the perils of early retirement.

The Rushworth War is a love story within a love story. When Setsuko arrives in Brisbane to bury her estranged father she stumbles upon the real story of what happened between him and Frank Chambers in the Rushworth camp for enemy aliens where they spent the war years. David, Frank’s son, is convinced that the love of Frank’s life was Setsuko’s grandmother Hanako, but the truth is far more disturbing.

A Note:

The two screenplays presented here as my creative practice research are polished drafts for proposed films and should be read as speculative pieces. They are scenarios, in a literal sense. They suggest stories and ways of telling, but implicit within them is the knowledge, even the hope, that better stories and ways of telling might emerge from a future collaborative rewriting and production process.

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THE EXEGESIS: SYNOPSIS

A close examination of four recent works for the Australian screen, Heaven’s Burning (1997), The Goddess of 1967 (2000) Changi (2001) and Japanese Story (2003), reveals a tendency for Australian screenwriters to limit Japanese characters to a very narrow range of expression. This results in Japanese screen characters conforming to certain conventional representations of the Japanese: as savage, as fugitive from an over-disciplined culture, as post-modern tourist. These conventional representations are based on orientalist assumptions about the Japanese and serve in their turn to perpetuate these assumptions.

One way to break free of these conventions is to write Japanese screen characters that are richly imagined individuals with hopes, needs and desires complex enough to invite identification across ethnic and cultural divisions. In order to do this it is necessary to cease to perceive Asia and Asians as peripheral to ‘Australianness’ as it is constructed in our films. The exegesis argues that the diversity that is our everyday reality as Australians would be given better expression if Japanese and other Asian screen characters were sometimes placed at the centre of a cinematic construction of who we are.

As a white Australian, married to a Japanese who has lived in Australia for over twenty years and with whom I have two children, I have both a personal and a professional interest in seeing ‘Australianness’ redefined in our screen stories. A screen culture that continues to speak of and to an audience assumed to be innocent of intercultural experience can only ever be narrow and of limited interest. As a contributor to Australian screen culture I aim to tell stories in which ‘Australianness’, rather than implying a racial anxiety to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’, tries to express a deeper desire for connection across barriers of all kinds, including that of race.

PREFACE: PROJECT BACKGROUND

‘So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of

narrative for any report of the way things really happened’, according

to Hayden White (1980, p. 5), that it might be described as ‘a panglobal

fact of culture…a solution to a problem of general human concern,

namely the problem of how to translate knowing into telling’.

Screenwriting is as concerned to translate knowing into telling as any

other form of narrative, and is just as implicated in all of the difficulties

and dangers of that process. For, while the ‘why’ of storytelling might

be simply that all human cultures do it, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of

knowing and telling are as complex and contested as any human

activity can be.

This study explores the problem of ‘telling’ the Japanese in Australian

film stories, that is both in the produced films I discuss in the exegesis,

and in the unproduced screenplays I present as the creative practice

component of this thesis. For the purposes of this study I have not

made a distinction between film narratives that exist as finished products and film narratives that exist only on the page. If I have

attributed sole responsibility for the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the narratives

I discuss in the exegesis to the screenwriter, it is with the

understanding that the collaborative nature of filmmaking blurs the lines of responsibility. The story that is told on the page is never exactly the same as the story that is told on the screen. Nevertheless if the screenwriter has been content to be credited for the screenplay in the finished product, I have assumed that he or she is happy to be held responsible for the story that appears on the screen, and for how it is told.

In selecting which produced film narratives to discuss in the exegesis component of the study I have been concerned to narrow my focus to those recent narratives that specifically represent Japanese characters in major roles. There are two related reasons for this decision, the first being the unique connotations that Japan and the Japanese have for

Anglo-Celtic Australia and the implications of these connotations within a narrativisation of an Australian identity, and the second being the need for my exegetical insights to directly inform my creative practice. What I needed for the purposes of the study was an understanding of the existing repertoire of specific images of the

Japanese in our films so that I could devise ways to move beyond that repertoire. In this sense I was less concerned with the general question of multiculturalism in Australian cinema, as with the particular way notions of Japaneseness are constructed within our film culture.

The motivation for this study was both personal and professional. As a

practicing screenwriter I have been engaged with the problem of

‘telling’ Japanese screen characters since the late nineties. At that time I was commissioned by SBS Independent to write a television drama series dealing with the influx of Japanese migrants to the Gold Coast. It was a story I was in a position both to know something about, and to tell in dramatic form. I was married to a Japanese who had migrated to

Australia in 1983, I had lived on the Gold Coast since moving there during the so-called ‘bubble economy’, and I was an experienced screenwriter. This was a combination the then commissioning editor of drama at SBS Barbara Masel felt was probably unique and she encouraged me to start work.

The result was a four part series called Paradaisu that remains unproduced and was therefore, in a professional sense, a failure. In a personal sense however, the writing of Paradaisu was revelatory. The

main character in the series was a retired Japanese businessman. I did

not at the time think this a particularly odd choice. I knew a few men

like him. I had watched how they came to the Gold Coast loaded up

with cash and then retired in order to spend it, which is not as easy as

it sounds. Deep questions were involved: How to live in a new

country? How to pass the time when work is no longer necessary?

How to connect to children who are living in a foreign language? My

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character had to come up with answers upon which the entire drama

and comedy of the series would rest. His answers had to resonate not

only with fellow Japanese migrants, but also with anyone who has ever

dreamed of a better life somewhere else. My character had to be both

unique and common, both an individual and an everyman.

Having worked very hard to translate knowing into telling I was

disappointed that my efforts, for complex reasons, failed to reach an

audience. The script was privately praised but could not be financed.

Barbara Masel suggested to me some time later that the series, as it was

conceived, was too ambitious, though I never knew if she meant in

terms of the material it dealt with, or in terms of its potential cost.

Ironically, the very people who could have seen the series made very comfortably, those in charge of co-production at Japan’s giant national public broadcaster NHK, were the only people who directly questioned the work’s content. They charged that it was too gloomy and unglamorous, and suggested that the main character should be a beautiful young Japanese woman who falls in love with a handsome young Australian man. They did not want to know what I knew. They wanted a conventional tale, a cliché. But it was too late for that. I had already discovered the pleasures and perils of telling an unconventional story in an unusual way. I did not respond to their

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suggestion that I start all over again with the aim of glamorising the

Gold Coast for a gullible Japanese audience.

My work on Paradaisu made me very sensitive to the way other

Australian screenwriters ‘told’ Japanese characters in their work. I was frustrated when I saw Japanese characters in Australian film and television that conformed only to the most superficial construct of

‘Japaneseness’. I started to see how odd my choice of a main character

for Paradaisu had been. I knew this character. I understood that his

being Japanese was only a part of who he was and the choices he

made, but I realised that for many others, some of Australia’s leading

screenwriters included, the Japanese remained unknown. I saw

constant evidence to suggest that, faced with ‘telling’ a Japanese

character, Australian screenwriters tended to rely on their most

superficial observations, and invited audiences to do the same. That

realisation spurred me to undertake this research. I wished to know

why clichéd representations of the Japanese were so common in our

screen stories. I wished to understand what this might reveal about

Australian screen stories in general and how they are told. And I

wished to advance an understanding of how these clichés might be resisted.

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As an audience member who is reasonably well acquainted with Japan and the Japanese, I felt cheated by the representations of the Japanese I saw in our screen stories. As a professional writer I believed there was a need for Australian screenwriters to be more aware of the underlying assumptions about ethnicity and character their work sometimes reflects. To my knowledge there had been no similar study done in

Australia by a practicing screenwriter. There was a need, I felt, not only to systematically articulate these assumptions, but also to move beyond them in my own creative practice. It is hoped that this research achieves both of these aims.

Quite simply and starkly, for anyone concerned with a transformation of the cinema, with new directions, new possibilities, a new consciousness of things, the Australian cinema is without interest.

Brian McFarlane and Geoff Mayer, New Australian Cinema, 1992, p.

1. Introduction: Lovely Corpses

In Sue Brook’s 2003 film Japanese Story there is a pivotal scene in which

Toni Collette’s character Sandy has to lift the body of her drowned

Japanese lover into the back of a four wheel drive. It is a beautiful

performance, both by Collette as she struggles with the body’s dead

weight, and by Gotaro Tsunashima as he plays Hiro’s lovely corpse.

As Olivia Khoo noted in her review of the film (2003, n.p.) this scene,

although skilful and oddly beautiful, is emblematic of a

disappointingly long history in our films of killing off Asian characters

so that white protagonists might be seen to have learned something of

moral worth. Sacrifice of the racial interloper is not a new narrative

device in our screen stories. Australian cinema has long presented an

orientalist construction of national identity in which Asia and Asians

are terminally ‘other’ (Chua, 1993, p.28). Within this construction the

subjectivity of the audience has been assumed to be white and

complete identification with the films’ white protagonists has been

invited and expected. Despite our increasingly visible diversity as a

society, and the promotion of this diversity through what Jon Stratton

has called (1998, p.15) ‘official multiculturalism’, Australia’s

mainstream film culture has yet to acknowledge or challenge this

construction in any profound way. It is one aim of this study to explore how mainstream film might begin to represent this diversity by locating Asian protagonists within ‘Australianness’, instead of sacrificing them on its altar.

Another, equally important aim of the study is to explore how screenwriters might attempt to create diverse subjectivities and invite diverse identifications in the actual process of creating screenplays.

One way of resisting an orientalist construction of who we are is by discrete acts of expression that undermine orientalism’s assumptions and paradigms. This happens in real life all the time. It is what Stratton calls (1998, p.15) ‘everyday multiculturalism’, wherein ‘cultures, produced by individuals in their everyday lives, merge, creolise and transform’. It hardly happens at all in our films, which is why Khoo, despite wanting desperately to like Japanese Story, was so disappointed

by it. The reasons for this may lie as much in the way films like Japanese

Story, and before it films like Craig Lahiff’s Heaven’s Burning (1997),

Stephen Wallace’s Turtle Beach (1992) and Peter Weir’s The Year of

Living Dangerously (1982) are initially imagined and written, as in the way they are produced and marketed. It may be that film scripts that emphasise plot over character tend to rely too heavily on unexamined assumptions and paradigms of all kinds, and that it is largely within these assumptions and paradigms that the work of ideology is done. In

Turtle Beach, Sien Keng Chua observes (1993, p. 33) ‘a complex representation of the determination and courage of…two women of different races’ is subsumed beneath ‘an orientalist and sexist discourse

of conservative motherhood’. The second half of Gallipoli (Dir. Peter

Weir, 1981), according to Graeme Turner, ‘turns its characters into

heroes, as the standard mythologising framework claws back their

individuality and oppositional potential, into the conventional [Anzac]

legend’ (1999, p.178). In both of these cases, as well as in Khoo’s

response to Japanese Story, the disappointment the critic feels is at the capitulation of character to ideology expressed as plot. What this sense

of disappointment implies is a belief that character as a driver of story

has a greater potential to overturn ideological paradigms and

assumptions than does plot. Moreover, a conviction is expressed,

which I as both critic and practitioner share, that the work of film is to

be oppositional and ‘real’ in the Proustian sense of the word suggested

above, that is, capable of destabilising ‘conventional’ feeling.

In this context it is interesting to speculate how the above films might

have told more interesting stories had they been written by some

method whereby the plot emerges only and always from character and

never the other way round. In a later discussion I will investigate how the unconventional approach of British filmmaker Mike Leigh to screenwriting demonstrates the power of character-driven storytelling

to destroy cliche. By such a method a character like Hiro in Japanese

Story might have been allowed far more autonomy, authenticity and depth than he is permitted when his chief role in the film, as dictated

by the orientalist delineations of the plot, is to die. How greater

autonomy, authenticity and depth of character might be more

commonly achieved in screenwriting is one of the questions this study

seeks to answer, but for the moment I want only to point to some of the

consequences of their relative absence in Australian films dealing with

Asia and Asians.

‘There is no reason to assume,’ says Gabrielle Finnane, ‘that most

Australians take the implied world view of their national cinema as

‘our’ world view’ (1997, p. 53), particularly those Australians whose

cultural backgrounds, or whose intercultural experiences, are not

represented in that cinema. In fact, it is arguable that many Australians

see very little that connects with their own world view in their national

screen culture and see that culture as not so much a reflection of who

‘we’ are as an indication of who they, as individuals, are not. Edward

Said might have been describing such a perception when he described culture as, among other things, ‘a system of exclusions’ (Said, 1984, p.11). This lack of connection, according to Suew Keng Chua, is likely to be most acutely felt by Asian-Australian viewers of local films, when these films pretend to speak of Asia and Asians.

In a text where all bodies are inscribed as white, the assumption of a

white viewing subjectivity may pose less of a problem for these

viewers. But in a text where some bodies are inscribed as white or

Anglo-Celtic and others as Asian, the Asian Australian viewer is

immediately confronted with a dilemma – to assume a white textual

subjectivity conflicts with his/her ethnic subjectivity. But to assume

an Asian spectatorial subjectivity is also to claim an exiled

space…since to be culturally and physically Asian is to be in Asia,

never in Australia. (Chua, 1993,p.30)

In watching more recent films like Heaven’s Burning, The Goddess of

1967, and Japanese Story, in which Asian characters have at last been

allowed into the country, the Asian Australian viewer might be

encouraged to expect a less fraught experience. But even these latest

attempts to negotiate the deep ambivalence that underlies relations

between Anglo-Celtic Australians and Asians buckle under a self-

imposed pressure to constrain Asia and Asians within ‘liberal sentimental scenarios’ (Finnane, 1997, p.67) in which Asia functions only as ‘a terrain against which the moral ethos of the principal

Australian character can be measured, and confirmed’ (ibid).

This sense of inhabiting a country unlike the one represented in

Australian cinema, while still being Australian, is not felt exclusively by Asian Australians. Their particular difficulty with the dominant ideology of Australian films has resonance for many Anglo-Celtic viewers of local cinema, myself included. Jon Stratton has expressed his unease with the dominance of Anglo-Celtic subjectivities in films from the 1990’s, lamenting the absence in them of the portrayal of

Asians. ‘It is clear,’ says Stratton, ‘that, even now…a quarter of a century after the ending of the White Australia Policy, such portrayal is still limited and problematic’ (1998, p.167). I have difficulty with the absence of Asian subjectivities in our cinema, not because I am ethnically or culturally ‘other’, but because my desire to see Australian films that are true investigations of who we are is so consistently frustrated as to make me feel ideologically ‘othered’, excluded from the dominant world view our cinema presents to us as ‘ours’. For without significant ethnic diversity within that world view it can only ever seem to me to be lacking. What it is missing is not just visible evidence of diversity but any proof of a profound artistic engagement with the ethical issues contained within everyday, lived multiculturalism. These issues hinge on what Ghassan Hage describes (2003,p.151) as ‘the presence of other as gift’:

Why is the other’s presence a gift? Because the other, through my

desire to interact with him or her, offers me, by making it visible, my

own humanity. When I interact with others and I fail to see them as

offering such a gift, it means that I consider such others as less than

human. Here we have the basic, unethical, foundation of all forms of

racism. (ibid.)

My Australian Life and The Rushworth War, the screenplays that make up the creative practise on which this research is founded, were written in large part as a response to this ethical lacuna. The screenplays aim to address the desire I and others feel for a deeper connection with the national cinema culture. No doubt my own inability to feel this connection now has to do with personal experience and with my particular taste in films, but it also arises from a disappointingly conservative tendency in Australian cinema to mistrust what Annette Hamilton calls ‘the dialogical impulse’ (1997, p.159). This impulse I take to mean the desire that animates all true dialogue, which is to break down the divide between self and projected other in order that the idea of a fixed and immutable subjectivity be challenged. It is this impulse, Hamilton suggests, which has the greatest potential to undermine ‘the East’ as a site of difference in

Australian films and the ‘Asian’ as an embodiment of impenetrable mystery. Beyond East and West there is, according to Chris Berry

(1994, p.54) ‘the liminal space on the edge of the colonial national imaginary and some other imaginary’, a hybrid space only accessible through dialogue as intersubjective exchange. What the nature of this

exchange might be has been the core question driving my research for this thesis. Australian films that attempt to represent the ambivalent relationship between ‘Australianness’ and ‘Asia’ have failed in the past because the liminal space they seek to inhabit is ultimately found to be

‘too liminal; the intersubjective truths are too threatening; the dialogical relation remains one of mutual mystification and a worrying

tendency to self-congratulation’ (Hamilton,1997, p.160).

By writing autonomous Asian protagonists and inviting identification

with their stories, I am attempting in these two screenplays to resist the

easy notion that Asia and Asians function in Australian film as ‘the

space of discovery of an Other which is finally only a better form of

self’ (Hamilton, 1997, p.159). In place of this notion I am positing the

possibility of a more complex role for Asians in Australian films, that

of subject. My aim is to shift the perception of Asians - and by

implication of other non-white characters - as marginal to a cinematic

construction of ‘Australianness’. By writing Asian protagonists of some

complexity and depth I aim to challenge the assumption, apparent in

many Australian films, that ‘Australianness’ is a fixed order founded

on an Anglo-Celtic subjectivity. According to Richard Dyer:

The need to order is liable to be accompanied by a belief in the

absoluteness and certainty of any particular order, a refusal to

recognise its limitations and partiality, its relativity and changeability,

and a corresponding incapacity to deal with …fact and experience.

(1993, p.12)

‘Fact and experience’ would dictate that Asians are as liable to be

central to Australian film narratives as any other non Anglo-Celtic group, perhaps more so given the long involvement, on many levels, of

Australia with Asia. Yet Anglo-Celtic protagonists continue to exclude all others from a significant screen presence in local films. In this way

Australian screenwriters continue to display a largely unexamined

faith in what bell hooks calls a ‘white supremacist aesthetic’ (1996,

p. 72), the power of which is to ‘disallow and discourage the

production of any group of images that break with this aesthetic’ (ibid).

While there is no demand for change from within our screen culture

we are doomed to be captives of the local version of what hooks

describes as ‘the imagist hegemony of the collective white supremacist

capitalist patriarchal imagination’ (1996, p.76). Japan and the Japanese,

as figments of this imagination, are likewise doomed to be reduced to

representing what is subsumed by and inimical to a white supremacist

order. This is one reason Hiro must die in Japanese Story, not because he

is an actual threat to that order, but because his sacrifice is necessary to

the continuation of its imagined dominance. Had he lived, the dialogue

into which he and Sandy had entered, very tentatively, in the first half

of the film might have been required to move away from the

comparatively safe subject of their cultural and linguistic differences.

They, and their audience, might have felt pressured to enter an unstable liminal space on the edge of Berry’s ‘other imaginary’ where difference no longer implies a fixed order but an opportunity for profound mutual transformation.

In the first part of the discussion that follows I analyse four recent works for screen in which Japanese characters play significant roles.

They are the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s 2001 mini-series

Changi, Craig Lahiff’s Heaven’s Burning, Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 and Sue Brook’s Japanese Story. The discussion analyses how these

works represent the Japanese within the Australian context and more

specifically, how the individual Japanese characters featured in these

works construct stereotyped notions of ‘Japaneseness’ as opposed to

‘Australianness’. The second part of the exegesis examines how My

Australian Life and The Rushworth War challenge these prevailing

conventions, both in terms of how they represent the Japanese, and of

my specific approach to the writing of characters for the screen.

2. Aso and Yukio: Typical Japanese Savages

Since the 1990’s, ‘Asia’ in Australian film and television has more often than not been represented by images of Japan and the Japanese. This is probably because throughout the previous decade Japanese investment in Australia boomed as did Japanese tourism and immigration. As a result this period saw ‘the Japanese, more than any other national group…marked as the “Asian invaders” as they bought into Australian property and land’ (Stratton, 1998, p.165). These economic and historical factors did not necessarily translate into a deep desire on the part of filmmakers to examine what the relationship between Australia and Japan might mean. Indeed, the representation of Japan and the

Japanese in recent Australian film and television has done very little to expand our repertoire of images of ‘Japaneseness’ beyond the two most familiar: the ‘savage/warrior’ and the ‘tourist/lover’. Both images place the Japanese firmly beyond ‘Australianness’ and relegate

Japanese characters to the definitive and unambiguous status of ‘other’.

How and why this is achieved is worth examining in more detail if the overall tendency to shy away from ‘the dialogical impulse’ in

Australian film culture is to be better understood.

Lieutenant Aso (Gotaro Tsunashima) is the main Japanese character in

Changi, a six part drama series broadcast by the Australian

Broadcasting Commission in 2001. Written by John Doyle, best known as one half of the comedy duo ‘Roy and HG’, the series tells the story of

six POWs who survived imprisonment by the Japanese and who

continue to come together at the Cherrybrook RSL Club each year to

remember their ordeal. Originally conceived (ABC, 2002) as a

television sitcom along the lines of Hogan’s Heroes the series is an oddly unsettling mix of material primarily intended to be comic and material ideologically fashioned to serve a serious narrative purpose. The story, according to the ABC’s official Changi website (2003), shows ‘how humour won the battle for six young men… Australians,’ we are told

‘survived as Japanese prisoners of war in disproportionately high numbers, perhaps because their mateship turned humour into an art form’(ibid). In a story avowedly about ‘Australian mateship’ there is apparently no room for ambiguity about the role of the Japanese. In the

person of Lieutenant Aso, promptly nicknamed by the Australians

‘Arsehole’, the Japanese are there to show ‘various aspects of cruelty,

madness, stupidity, misguidance and bungling ineptitude’ (ibid), all

qualities we are invited by the writer to interpret as ethnically, rather

than historically, determined.

In portraying Aso and his fellow officers in Changi as innately

deficient, the series follows in a long tradition of POW literature dating

back to the early post war period in which ‘with some splendid

exceptions, the Japanese soldier is characterised as either a bloodthirsty psychopath or, lamentably, as a simian buffoon’ (Gerster, 1983, p. 226).

Gerster’s explanation for the unrelieved racism of most POW narratives is that ‘…it was especially galling [for Australian soldiers] to surrender to a race who…had been regarded as a simple-minded

people politely bowing their way through life amid a shower of cherry

blossoms’, a race about whom the average POW was ‘arrogantly

ignorant’ (ibid.). In Changi Doyle has no apparent interest in eschewing this racist trope. ‘What I have written,’ he says, ‘is the Changi of my mind’ (ABC, 2002), a place in which the world is evidently divided along ethnic lines, between specifically ‘Japanese’ savagery and specifically ‘Australian’ humanity. In this sense ‘Australianness’, for

Doyle, is a special kind of whiteness, an unexamined and self- explanatory group dynamic that is ignorant and mistrustful of outsiders, and intolerant of differences within. ‘Here we have,’ according to Graeme Thorburn, ‘Australians as a unified group, cementing social bonds to repel alien forces’ (quoted in Garton, 2002, p.

82). Unfortunately what we also have, Thorburn concludes, is failed drama due directly to the writer’s aversion to the demands of true dialogue. There is ‘…no struggle to talk in the scenes [and] little inner conflict within the characters, either in the camps or after’ (quoted in

Garton, 2002, p. 80). Changi is what Garton calls an ‘enfeebled

narrative’ of the POW experience, a narrative that I would argue is

weakened by the ideological imperatives of Doyle’s essential sentimentality. Thus undermined, Doyle’s story is made to shrink away from the complexity and multiplicity of real Changi stories in order to embrace a politically inspired fantasy – what Garton describes as a ‘nostalgic vision of national cohesion cemented through the commemoration of an Anzac ethos’ (2002, p.79).

Moreover, just as the narrative of the six protagonists in Changi is

constrained by this ideological imperative, so too is the narrative of

their antagonist Aso. Just as the six prisoners are given no opportunity

in the series to be anything other than part of a group requiring

conformity to a rigid code of larrikin humour, so too is Aso deprived of

an opportunity to be anything other than a fanatically loyal follower of

a doomed cause. This effectively excludes Aso from the richly ironic

universe Kitano Takeshi’s character is permitted to inhabit in another

important POW narrative Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Dir. Oshima,

1983). In this film, based on Laurens van der Post’s autobiographical

novel The Seed and the Sower, Tom Conti’s Mr Lawrence has a

memorable meeting with his former guard in the latter’s prison cell the

day before the guard, played by Takeshi, is to be executed for war

crimes. In this scene, the two men are no longer enemies, one having

power over the other, but equals. They have moved beyond their

enmity sufficiently to express bewilderment at the futility of a war they

have both survived, only for one of them to be punished for his part in it. Mr Lawrence’s character, being a translator, belongs to the liminal world on the edge of the ‘other imaginary’ referred to earlier in this discussion, and it is only by his and his former guard’s mutual embrace of ‘the dialogical impulse’ that such a scene becomes conceivable. It is Aso’s and our loss that Doyle chose to turn away from this impulse in Changi in favour of reifying the ‘arrogant ignorance’ of the Japanese that his Australian characters so proudly display throughout the series. It should come as no surprise that a search of the

credits at the end of each episode of Changi reveals that no Japanese

advisor was attached to the series. It is as if the war is imagined to have

not been about the Japanese experience of it, but essentially and always

about the opportunity it provided for ordinary white Australian men

to prove their inborn invincibility.

The ordinariness of ‘Australianness’ and its easy conflation with

whiteness makes it hard to see these elements in Australian screen

stories. As in any other national cinema culture dominated by bell

hook’s ‘white supremacist aesthetic’, whiteness in Australian film and television is so ordinary as to be invisible. Contemplating the tendency for whiteness to vanish in this way, Richard Dyer (2000, p. 749)

suggests that its ‘everything and nothing’ quality gives it the capacity

to pass itself off as ‘embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior’

(2000, p. 734). Australian screen stories which do not feature women in major roles, or which do not feature, even in minor roles, characters who do not speak English, or are not from an Anglo-Celtic background, are not considered ‘unAustralian’ as a result of these

exclusions. On the contrary, films like Gallipoli (Dir. Weir, 1981), Breaker

Morant (Dir. Beresford, 1977) and Sunday Too Far Away (Dir. Hannam,

1975) rest their iconic status on their appropriation of ‘Australianness’

as a site for the transformation of working class, white, male

sensibilities into heroism, a tradition that Changi seeks to continue.

Screen stories about white male protagonists are so commonplace presumably because white males are considered by most Australian filmmakers to be sufficient, if not central, to the telling of our national stories. The role of white males in a significant portion of our screen culture is to ‘normalise’ Australia for us, by belying our unnatural and discomforting diversity, in the same way that the six men in Changi

‘normalise’ the experience of the POW for us by being all the same, a homogenous and invincible group.

Asian characters tend to appear in mainstream Australian film and television, if they appear at all, as outsiders, exotics, whose quality of mystery hinders identification with them. Ironically this is even the case in Australian screen narratives set in Asia. Films like Ken

Cameron’s Bangkok Hilton (1989) or Philip Noyce’s Echoes of Paradise

(1988) enter the ‘other imaginary’ of Asia only to retreat from it with palpable relief. These films and others like them offer an anxious discourse on Australia’s proximity to, but difference from, Asia. They represent what Maryanne Dever calls ‘ineluctably polarised readings of “Asia” and “Australia” ‘(1997, p. 2). Nor do we see many local films in which Australian Asian characters appear, unless they are there to represent ethnic difference. If we did we might begin to wonder whether the ‘normal’ in Australia was not much more fluid and boundless than we have been led to believe by our screen culture. We might also wonder why it had taken so long for our filmmakers to see

the fluidity that is all around us all the time and to show us, to

ourselves and to the outside world, in all our diversity and

strangeness. In the absence of Asian characters that are on the screen to

be themselves, and Australians at the same time, we are presented with

the Japanese, who are there to be ‘unAustralian’, to confirm for us what

we are not.

In The Matter of Images Richard Dyer discusses the propensity for stereotypical film characters to ‘make fast, firm and separate what is in

reality fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant value

system cares to admit’ (1993, p.16). For Dyer the urge to stereotype a

particular group stems from an anxiety about the perceived order of

things. He suggests a proportional relationship between the level of

anxiety experienced and the measure of the boundaries the stereotype

seeks to impose on the characterisation of the group:

…The degree of rigidity and shrillness of a stereotype indicates the

degree to which it is an enforced representation that points to a

reality, whose invisibility and or fluidity threatens the received

definitions of society perceived by those with the biggest sticks.

(ibid.)

John Doyle, in this sense, knows what he is about. The shared

humanity of Aso with his captives is not Doyle’s concern. It is his

inhumanity, his savagery, his ‘fast [and] firm’ separation from what is

normal that he wants to make clear. ‘I want to understand them,’ says

the mentally deranged Dutchman in episode three of Changi, meaning

of course that he wants to make some human sense of the Japanese.

‘You can’t,’ says Bill, the one the Australians call ‘the professor’, the

one who presumably should know. It is a bold statement, but one that

is entirely consistent with the basic premise of the series. The Japanese

are not there to be understood, specifically they are not there to be

understood by the Australians for whom the dialogical impulse is felt

to be the door to too much fluid liminality and a danger to one’s sanity.

The Dutchman in Changi is mad for a reason. He doesn’t have the

support of a group of larrikin mates. He is alone too much and is

therefore prone to self-doubt. In the end he dies of his insecurity, as

the English officer dies of his snobbery, and Aso of his terminal inhumanity. Only the Australians survive Doyle’s Changi. Their normality, which is in effect their whiteness, saves them to a man, proof of its supremacy over any kind of otherness.

This conflation of normality with Anglo-Celtic whiteness might be taken to be Changi’s final meaning. The Cherrybrook RSL club where the old POWs gather in the final episode of the series, under a portrait of the Queen, is an apt setting in which to reiterate the point. The professor might nowadays share a university cafeteria with Asian students, but here in Cherrybrook he is safely back in an uncontaminated white space he still comfortably co-inhabits with his mates year after year. Here is a space redolent with the signs and symbols of our Anglo-Celtic history – a history told and retold to validate the notion of what Stratton has called ‘the core culture’ (1998, p.208). The core culture exists because of its innate moral superiority over other cultures:

After all, if the ethnic cultures were of the same quality as the core

culture would they not be, or be part of, the core culture? That they

are not would by definition indicate their inherent inequality to the

moral standards of the core culture. (ibid.)

Nothing the professor or his mates say to each other at this reunion would suggest that this space had evolved to keep pace with

Australia’s transformation into a complex multicultural society with all

that that implies. The implication here is that the core culture is not

required to change, that it is the task of other cultures to rise to the

level of the core, while never being admitted into it. One conclusion

that could be drawn from Changi is that our transformation into a multicultural society implies nothing for ‘ordinary’ people like these men, that no pressure is felt by this group to adapt, that they meet every year not only to celebrate their ‘Australian mateship’ but to confirm the rightness of racial enmity, to make of it an absolute and timeless value. Far from acknowledging the ultimate futility of war, or from attempting to subvert its solid logic of ‘them’ and ‘us’, Changi

insists on celebrating the moral victory of whiteness over Japaneseness.

Aso’s death, which takes place off screen, is a necessary condition of

that victory, as is his unrelenting savagery. Had he been momentarily

kind, had he been allowed to express even the slightest doubt about his

country’s cause, had he lived beyond the war’s end to ponder his

complex fate, a claim might have been made for his humanity, a

connection might have been made between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In the

Changi of John Doyle’s imagining such a connection is inconceivable,

presumably because it is not desired.

-----

Japanese savagery is revisited in Craig Lahiff’s 1997 feature film

Heaven’s Burning. Unusually for an Australian film, Heaven’s Burning features two Japanese characters in major roles. Taken on its own this might be read as a sign that progress had been made in terms of the representation of Asians in Australian cinema, but only if any representation at all were better than none. ‘Rigidity’ and ‘shrillness’ in stereotyping are signs, according to Richard Dyer, of a high level of anxiety with regard to the other (1993, p.16). The possibility that the other might in fact be entirely normal is the source of this anxiety and its only cure a reassuring reification of difference, a retreat to ‘enforced’ order in the face of chaos. The strain of the effort to make the Japanese characters in Heaven’s Burning ‘abnormal’ causes the film to collapse at its core. Nothing much is signified by their presence except difference, abnormality, an unAustralian liking for repetitive acts of meaningless violence. This goes as well for the Afghani gangsters in the film. They are brutal to the core, butchers both literally and metaphorically, fanatical believers in the honour of the tribe. ‘I will be vengeance,’ says the father, renouncing his humanity in favour of a vaguely theological, unfathomable abstraction, which is unavailable to secular white men.

The film sets out to tell the story of an unhappy Japanese honeymooner who has secretly planned to abandon her new husband Yukio in

Australia and run off with her Japanese lover. Midori, played by sweet- faced Yuki Kudoh, is stood up by the lover and finds herself suddenly in the arms of getaway driver Colin, played by Russell Crowe. Colin saves her from the Afghans for whom he is working, killing one of them in the process. The dead man’s father swears revenge and a long distance car chase ensues in which Colin and Midori are pursued by the bloodthirsty Afghans who are, in turn, pursued by two plain- speaking detectives. The jilted husband Yukio is also on their trail, having transformed himself from a meek salaryman into a leatherclad bikie bearing arms. One bloody encounter follows another until in the end only the detectives remain. In the final scene they sit on the beach watching Colin’s car burning, with Colin and Midori dying inside it, shaking their heads at the lunacy of foreigners and the tragedy of

Australians who get into trouble on their account.

Heaven’s Burning is an important example of the construction of

Japaneseness in Australian cinema, but is a difficult film to take seriously as drama. It is an intercultural love story in which the lovers barely communicate. It is a road movie in which the road leads through landscapes that bear no resemblance to the geographically

plausible. It is a tale of vengeance in which the avenging forces are a

‘ridiculously over the top angel of vengeance’ and a bunch of ‘comic strip characters’ (Stratton, 2000, n.p.).

This has not deterred Felicity Collins from reading it as a progressive

development beyond the ‘masculinist ethos of Australian cinema’

(2000, n.p.) in which an intercultural father and ‘daughter’, the

detective Bishop and Midori, become ‘an unexpected addition to the existing pantheon of fathers and daughters who have a long tradition of upsetting mateship and landscape as the key to national identity’

(ibid.). That Midori is punished for her transgressive behaviour, by

death, does not seem to bother Collins, although it should. Her analysis

of the film suggests that Midori’s character is seriously intended to

subvert the ‘masculinist ethos’ at the heart of mateship and national identity. Yukio’s character, she similarly suggests, is intended to be subversive of ‘corporate culture’ (ibid.). He blows his boss’s head off she suggests not just as a gesture of ‘comic book style…exploitation

humour’ but because it signifies a ‘reprieve’ from the constraints of the father-son bond (ibid.). However this focus on father-son anxiety rather than on the film’s core racial assumptions causes Collins to neglect a more obvious way of reading these characters, as conforming to, rather than subverting the white masculinist order. The Japanese protagonists in Heaven’s Burning confirm the Japanese character as

uncomplicatedly criminal in the case of Midori, and psychopathically savage in the case of Yukio. Both in this sense deserve to die, and indeed both pursue self-destruction so recklessly in the film, the viewer is invited to believe that this too might be inbuilt, a kind of ethnically determined urge.

Their ethnicity marks Midori and Yukio everywhere they go and in almost every utterance, not just as Asians but specifically as Japanese.

When Midori first attaches herself to Colin he sends her into a truck stop café to buy hamburgers. As soon as she comes through the door a blond truckie remarks ‘Never seen one without a camera before’, making an obvious point about Japanese tourists, in case the others in the café haven’t noticed the presence of one in their midst. The same truckie then beats up Colin outside for trying to steal his rig, but this is not the topic of the verbal abuse that accompanies his blows. What he really seems to object to is Colin’s association with Midori. ‘You start interbreeding with inferior races,’ the truckie tells Colin as he kicks him repeatedly in the kidneys, ‘before you know it you’ll be breeding mongrels and half-wits’. In the very next scene Midori has rescued

Colin and brought him to a shack in the outback to recover. Here she starts to explain her predicament, with a surprising lack of emotion considering she has just been taken hostage at the point of a gun, then almost executed. She has apparently turned her back on Japan

thoroughly. ‘People have no true life there’ she says, implying that this life of criminality in a mythic desert setting she has just embarked upon, is somehow ‘true’ by comparison. ‘I can breathe here,’ she announces, a sentiment that could only be true if violent criminality were her natural habitat, her ethnic milieu, a kind of racial memory to which she is able to hark back whenever circumstances are conducive.

In a similar ‘throwback’ gesture Yukio, having shot his boss, proceeds to transform himself into a masterless samurai type. He shaves his head, presumably as a sign that he is renouncing life and preparing himself for an honourable death. He discards his suit in favour of a leather biker’s outfit in funereal black. Whenever we see him from this point on he is in this suit, alone, journeying down the road to the accompaniment of a melancholic eastern melody played on the koto, a sense of doom surrounding him that is later explained by Colin’s dad

Cam (Ray Barrett) as ‘bad karma’, all eastern philosophies being one

and the same thing to Cam. Like any good samurai Yukio kills without

compunction, violence in the name of honour being the posited

primitive essence of the warrior morality to which he has reverted, not

so much with ease, as with inevitability. Had he been white and bent

on avenging his wife’s desertion we might have been encouraged to

imagine that a twisted notion of love was part of his motivation for

killing whoever crosses his path. We might even have, in some quieter

moments, pitied him. But, unfortunately for Yukio, his Japaneseness prevents us from doing so. We are encouraged instead to regard him, as Midori does by the film’s end, as congenitally unfit for love. She shoots him point blank when he professes his love for her. ‘You don’t know what love is!’ she proclaims. She does, because she has been with the monosyllabic Colin. He has shown her how white men love their women, passively, without saying or doing anything, just by being who they are. White men are natural born lovers in this order of things, as Japanese are natural born killers, and Afghanis natural born torturers. Felicity Collins (2000 n.p.) is right in thinking that ‘neither

Japanese nor Afghani codes of honour can seriously contaminate the

Australian ethic of a fair go which motivates Colin and his father Cam’.

If they could the entire premise of the film, which is that ethnicity, as opposed to character, defines difference, would be compromised. The life-altering power of this premise is recalled and lamented by Frantz

Fanon in The Fact of Blackness. Made an object of scrutiny by white men every time he enters their company Fanon becomes agonisingly aware that he is ‘overdetermined from without’ by his blackness, that his colour makes him ‘slave, not to the “idea” that others have of [him] but of [his] own appearance’ (1999, p. 419). Jews at least have a chance, says Fanon, to be judged on their actions and behaviour before their ethnicity is discovered, but the fact of colour precludes any delay in the white man’s response to Fanon. ‘I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those

white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus…’(1999, p.420). Yukio, like Doyle’s Lieutenant Aso, is similarly ‘overdetermined from without’. Acclaimed screenwriter, author and playwright Louis Nowra has written him to be viewed not as a character whose actions are recognisably human, but as a character whose motives are only skin deep, a racial twitch rather than a

complex human response. It is as if even a writer as experienced as

Nowra cannot help himself when confronted with the ‘Asianness’ of

the Japanese, so readily does he fall into writing race as the

determinant of character, rather than character as the determinant of

humanity.

The most telling scenes in Heaven’s Burning are those that take place between Cam and the Japanese. Cam, of course, is old enough to remember the war, a fact that apparently makes it inevitable he will regard all Japanese with suspicion, if not hatred. When Midori turns up out of the blue with Colin, Cam seems friendly enough. He welcomes them both. He seems pleased to see his wayward son. He makes no comment on his choice of a companion. But in case we imagine Cam is without an opinion he is given a later scene alone with

Midori in which she challenges him, as if she knew all along he was faking it, with a leading question, ‘You don’t like me much do you?’. It is an inquiry that comes out of nowhere. Cam has neither said nor

done anything to indicate his dislike for her, she has neither said nor done anything to provoke feelings of dislike. We can only assume that the screenwriter believes some subtext to their encounter is required, some reference to a racial memory that would have them automatically unable to form a relationship. Cam replies, with a hint of nostalgia, that he hasn’t the energy to hate anyone, which is not the same as saying he likes Midori. He doesn’t. She has just told us so. In the absence of any other explanation for his coolness towards her we are left to assume that he, like the truckie who earlier beat and abused Colin, disapproves of the Japanese on principle. Cam’s death a few scenes later at the hands of the ruthless Yukio only validates his judgement, if validation

were required, that the Japanese are nothing but trouble.

Not that Cam goes quietly. In what David Stratton (2000, n.p.)

describes as an ‘unfortunate scene… which would have made even

Pauline Hanson blanch’ Cam lies fatally wounded at Yukio’s feet,

spitting venom at the entire Japanese race, showing his true colours at

last. He reminds Yukio and the audience, most of whom are

presumably too young to remember, that Japan started the war, and

that this was bad karma. ‘Soon Yukio,’ he says with his life’s blood

ebbing away, ‘your tiny country with its millions of tiny people will get your karma. Earthquakes, typhoons…’ For a man with two fatal bullet wounds to his chest it is a long and complex argument to be

making, one that Yukio cuts short by shoving Cam’s head in the dam water and drowning him out. That the film’s creators decided first to include this scene, then to cut it, then to include it again, must indicate how problematic its content felt even to them, whose basic ideology as expressed in the film is a white supremacist one. For Stratton (2000, n.p.) to call the scene an ‘ugly blemish on what is generally an excitingly staged and well-acted romantic thriller’ misses the point in at least one sense. Cam’s overtly racist remarks are not out of place in

Heaven’s Burning. They illustrate a response to Japaneseness that the film has already established is, despite its shrillness, common to the point of being normal. Cam is only adding his voice to that of the truckie who screams abuse at Colin for breeding with inferior races, and to that of the man in the wheelchair who wonders to himself whether the ‘Japs’ have taken over heaven too. The two detectives reserve their shrillness for the Afghanis but the theme is the same nevertheless. The Japanese along with the Afghanis are ‘laid bare’ by what is said of them by a series of white men, ‘dissected,’ as Fanon recalls he was, ‘under white eyes, the only real eyes’ (1999, p. 420). The white man’s gaze fixes them and they are no longer human but members of a different genus. They are Japanese or Afghani with all the characteristics expected of the species; savagery, criminality and a lust for economic conquest.

It is truly as if, in David Mamet parlance, the nail had come to resemble the house (Mamet, 1991, p.68). Mamet is here referring to the way individual scenes in most Hollywood screenplays tend to try to do the work of an entire script, and therefore lose their meaning as scenes. He instructs his Columbia Film School students not to:

make the beat do the service of the whole, don’t try to reiterate the

play in the scene…It’s how most acting is done today. “I’m so glad to

see you today because, as you’ll find out later, I’m a mass murderer” ‘

(1991, p. 35).

To do so is to ‘overdetermine’ a scene from ‘without’, or a character

from his appearance, in the way that Fanon describes. According to

Mamet (p.10) ‘the choice of the artist’, as opposed presumably to that of the hack, is to film every scene in the least ‘interesting’ way in order

‘to make a statement based on the meaning of the scene, not on the

appearance of the scene’ (ibid.). In Heaven’s Burning scenes like that described above between Cam and Midori attempt to reiterate the whole screenplay by restating its position on race. They remind the audience that the characters in this film cannot rise above their appearance, that their ethnicity determines forever who they are and how they will act. ‘You don’t like me much do you, because I’m

Japanese, and you’re old enough to have fought the Japs in the war and probably even killed a couple with your bare hands’, is the true

thrust of Midori’s question to Cam. ‘ I hate the Japs because they lost the war then won the peace and your father was probably one of those

bastards who tortured our POW’s on the Burma Railway than went on

to make a fortune in transistor radios’ is the subtext of Cam’s dying

speech to Yukio. In fact neither of these scenes need have referred to

race at all. Midori might have been more likely to talk about the

traumatic events of the day, remembering that Colin has just had his

hands nailed to a motel room dresser by a couple of butchers. Cam

might have pleaded with the madman in the black leather to spare his

life, or failing that might have tried to convince Yukio that the beach

was a hundred miles north rather than south in a last ditch attempt to put him off Colin’s scent. Midori and Cam might in this way have been relieved of the impossible burden of having to perform whole

plays-within-scenes, instead of discrete beats of the film’s story. They are in fact required by the screenwriter to depart from the plot altogether in these scenes, in order to be ‘interesting’. There is no explanation for the inclusion of the topic of Japaneseness in these scenes, except the screenwriter’s desire to provide the audience with information about Australia’s previous entanglement with Japan. No

matter that the information is misplaced and excessive. ‘How do we keep [the audience’s] attention?’ Mamet asks his students (1991, p. 20).

‘Certainly not by giving them more information but…by withholding

all information except that information the absence of which would make the progress of the story incomprehensible’.

Heaven’s Burning ends in a bloodbath. All of the foreigners have been expunged from the landscape, punished for their foreignness and all

that goes with it: the savagery, the wanton criminality, the

unacceptably foreign codes of honour. Colin is dead because, with

Midori, he has transgressed against the laws of racial division upon which the order is built, against its colonialist discourse of ‘them’ and

‘us’. This discourse, according to Homi Bhabha (1999, p. 370), presents

us always with a paradox. It represents difference as both ‘rigidity and

an unchanging order, as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic

repetition’. Similarly the racial stereotype that is so commonly revived

to illustrate this discourse ‘vacillates between what is always ‘in place’,

already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’

(ibid.). It is the unexamined ambivalence within racial stereotypes that

so seriously undermines the power of narratives like Changi and

Heaven’s Burning, by preventing them from moving beyond racial anxiety. As Bhabha also points out (p. 374), ‘[t]he stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that [denies] the play of difference’. Death then is the ultimate simplification, the ultimate barrier to what Barucha (2000, p.159)

describes as our capacity to ‘imagine other modalities of meeting that have not yet been envisioned in our dominant world views’. Death is also, according to Andrew Horton’s Writing the Character-Centered

Screenplay, a rejection of character as open-ended. ‘Character…is never finalised,’ says Horton, ‘except by death itself, which merely wraps the mystery rather than exposes it’ (1994, p. 28).

If ‘the play of difference’ had governed the order of things in Heaven’s

Burning Colin and Midori might at least have outwitted their enemies for long enough to find out more about love than the little they know, long enough even to encounter what is unknowable about love.

Unfortunately for them the film denies what is unknowable in favour of a fixation on that which can and must be endlessly repeated, the stereotype, the Japanese as criminal, the Japanese as savage warrior, the Japanese as fugitive from the constraints of an over-disciplined society. ‘I can breathe here!’ says Midori at the beginning of her adventure with Colin, but for how long?

3. Sam Nakadai: Criminality Comes Home

My Australian Life is the first screenplay of the two that make up the creative practice component of this research. My basic intention in this work was to write a mainstream film that featured a Japanese central character. This was already a conscious break with the conventions of

Australian mainstream film. The success of the project, I believed,

depended on pushing beyond the kinds of images of the Japanese that

were common in other films. I felt this was important for a variety of

reasons, not least of which was my frustration with the shallowness of

these images and their inevitable dependence on an orientalist

discourse with which I was profoundly at odds.

Because of my wish to challenge this discourse I set out neither to

demonise the Japanese character I created, nor to subvert his

authenticity by an attachment to an aesthetic of white supremacy

requiring his death. I wanted him to live, literally. I also wanted him to

entertain, to be sufficiently complex and layered to invite identification

from an audience with diverse intercultural and transcultural

experiences. Ultimately I intended him to mystify, not in the sense that

the convention of ‘The East’ is designed to mystify, but in the sense

that to be unknowable is to be profoundly human. ‘Why should an actor come on stage as a symbol of his people?’ asks David Williams in the context of intercultural theatre. ‘Once he does so there is no chance of his being perceived as an individual’ (1996, p. 73). My aim in My

Australian Life was to write a film in which no one, including the central character Sam Nakadai, was symbolic of an ideology of race, or

was representative of anything other than him or herself. According to

Karatani (2000, p. 151), Edward Said’s greatest lesson was, ‘that there

are others – namely individuals who cannot be mere objects of analysis

or beauty, and that it is necessary to fight against any power …that

suppresses individuals’. My creative practice is intended to aid in that fight, to revivify the idea of the individual in Australian film culture, and to resist the temptation to simplify character in order to conform to conventional, cliched expressions of reality.

My Australian Life follows the fortunes of a retired Japanese businessman, Sam, who lives in a Gold Coast mansion with his wife,

Julie, a corrupt real estate broker. Their two adult children visit periodically to ask for money. When Sam discovers that Julie and her lover have murdered the lover’s wife aboard a luxury launch, dumping the body at sea, Sam decides to blackmail his wife for the sum of two hundred thousand dollars. The money is not for him. He has become enamoured with a young Vietnamese girl who plays the violin with

such sweetness she has bewitched him. Julie kills herself. Sam sells their waterfront mansion, gives the girl’s mother enough to set her up for life and buys a ticket home to Japan. He is just settling into his first class seat on the plane when fate catches up with him.

Sam was not born a criminal. Originally conceived as the protagonist of a four part drama series commissioned by SBS Independent Sam began life as the Japanese husband of an Australian woman he had met and married in his hometown of Kobe. Having sold his assets in Japan for an outrageous sum of money he proceeds over the next eight years to lose everything he has in a series of ill-considered investments.

When I wrote the series, which I described as a ‘riches to rags’ story, I was living on the Gold Coast with my Japanese husband and our two children. Sam was an amalgam of a number of our friends and acquaintances, Japanese men in middle age who had sold up their

Japanese assets at the height of the economic boom and migrated to

Surfers Paradise. A basic premise of the series was that Surfers

Paradise represented to these men, as it does to many other

Australians, their place in the sun. In this sense Sam’s dreams and aspirations were always imagined to be essentially Australian, and his story to be about all of us.

When I came to write a feature film based on the television series this premise did not change. I still wanted Sam to speak for us all. I still imagined his story was one that had resonance for anyone who has ever had what playwright David Hare memorably called ‘dreams of leaving’ (1980, p.41). The fact that Sam was Japanese I saw as having historical significance, in that it anchored him to a very particular time in the Gold Coast’s development, but as having no predetermined influence on his choices as a character. I wanted his autonomy as a character to remain in order that he achieve a level of complexity commonly unavailable to Japanese characters in Australian films. I believed that it was time an Australian film was written with an Asian central character. But I also understood the need to write an Asian character that did not reflect the racial anxieties of an audience assumed to be white. Sam in My Australian Life is such a character. He is an Everyman, someone whose criminality arises from a chain of events over which he has little control, not from an ethnically determined predisposition for crime.

The main challenge facing me as I wrote Sam’s story was to establish his subjectivity, to clarify at the outset that Sam’s story was not about how others see him, but about how he sees himself and how he interprets his circumstances. This is why Sam narrates My Australian

Life. It is his account of his life, entirely subjective, and entirely

unreflective about matters of race. In this way racial anxiety is displaced in My Australian Life by what might be called dramatic anxiety. The film is relieved of the crushing burden of telling a racial metanarrative in every scene, and is free to tell a dramatic story of which every scene is an essential but discrete part.

A temptation I consciously resisted in writing Sam was to make him

‘interesting’. For his story to work it was best for Sam to be unremarkable, plain speaking and apparently unconcerned by life. He is a relatively passive character, not because he is Japanese, but because passivity is what gets him through. When he does take action it is too little, too late. There is no suggestion of the exotic about Sam. He is a

man who conceives of himself as ordinary, even if others do not. He is,

in other words, associated with normality in a way that conflates

Japaneseness with the normal, and implies, for the sake of irony, some

abnormality in Australianness. When Sam ends up in prison he

becomes, in his own view, naturalised. Hasn’t the prisoner been the

archetypal Australian since the country’s beginnings? Doesn’t this in

itself make him a natural Australian? Even though these questions of

Sam’s are rhetorical ones, it is clear that in his own mind his story has

something of the archetypal about it, not of the archetypal Japanese, for

he is certainly not that, but of the archetypal migrant, the stranger in a

strange land.

Being a stranger is not the same as being other, in Fanon’s sense of being ‘overdetermined from without’. Sam’s strangeness is simply the mark of his individuality. As Eric Santner comments (2001, p.9), a true

openness to another individual or to another culture requires an

acknowledgement of strangeness, not as a barrier but as an invitation:

What makes the Other other is not his or her spatial exteriority with

respect to my being, but the fact that he or she is strange, and not only

to me but also to him or herself, is the bearer of an internal alterity, an

enigmatic density of desire calling for response beyond any rule-

governed reciprocity. (ibid.)

By making Sam’s subjectivity the measure of the normal in My

Australian Life I was not seeking to make him familiar, rather to invite

identification with the strangeness of his unique story. In this way I

wanted to undermine the power of whiteness to stand for both

universality and Australianness, and replace it with the power of

strangeness as a basic quality in all human desire. I wanted Sam’s

‘enigmatic density of desire’ (ibid.) to break through conventional

feelings about the Japanese, and invite identification with him on

another level, the level of his humanity. I wanted to ‘put a fire’ (Bogart,

2001, p. 93) under the stereotypical representation of the Japanese in

Tadashi Suzuki’s sense of ‘driving … through these Japanese stereotypes towards genuine expression’ (ibid.).

( My Australian Life, the screenplay, is intended to be read here)

40 THE CONTENTS OF THIS DOClJMENT ARE PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

MY AUSTRALIAN LIEE

By Cory Taylor

AWG Registration #8733

DECEMBER 2003 COPYRIGHT: CORY TAYLOR i

1 EXT SURFERS PARADISE MORNING 1 The skyline of Surfers Paradise as seen from the balcony of a house overlooking the Nerang River. It is a perfect day. The river gleams in the morning sun. Sam's house sits back from the river behind a swimming pool and a sweeping green lawn. It is an enormous pile. Sam's narration begins. SAM (V.0.) My name is Sam Nakadai. I came to the Gold Coast in 1988 with my Australian wife and our two children. SAM, a middle-aged Japanese man, emerges from a door on the second floor onto a balcony. He is carrying a quilt, which he spreads on the railing of the balcony to air. He is dressed in shorts and a Surfers Paradise tee shirt. He pauses to look out at the view over the water as a massive private launch goes by, adorned with half naked passengers. SAM (V.O.) We thought it would be better for them to grow up in Australia, 2 INT BEDROOM MORNING Sam vacuums the enormous bedroom meticulously.

SAM(V.0, ) The air is cleaner. He runs a finger along the edge of the bedside table to check for dust. He takes a towel he keeps tucked into the waistband of his shorts and dusts the table. On it are some framed photographs of his two children. He dusts these too. He sl ps out of his house slippers, jumps onto the massive bed and dusts the frame of the enormous original oil painting hanging above it. He straightens the painting. He makes the bed. 3 INT ENSWITE BATHRQOM MOWING 3

He smells the towels in the marble lined en suite bathroom and gathers them up for the wash,

4 INT HALLWAY MORNING 4

Sam takes an armful of the washing he's gathered, opens a hatch in the wall and sends it down the laundry shute. He pauses, looks down the shzate to make sure it is clear, then shoves another armful down. He enjoy@the shute, It is an e&lem of luxury for him.

5 INT UUNDRY MQRNlNG 5

Sam packs the washing machine, adds the soap and starts the cycle.

Srn(V.Q, ) f didn't work after I left Japan, 1 cooked and cleaned. 6 INT KITCHEN NOWING 6 Sam sits at the breakfast bar in his massive kitchen and shovels rice into his mouth, slurping mouthfuls of miso soup to wash it down, with a bit of canned salmon, still in the tin, on the side.

The Gold Coast Bulletin is open in front of him. He needs glasses to read it,

SAM(V.0, ) I looked after the children when they were at home.

7 MORNING 7 Sam lets himself into the double garage off the laundry.

His new black Mercedes is parked there, next to a space where Julie parks her car when she's at home.

He cliHlbs into the car, takes the garage door remote and opens the garage door then slowly backs the car out. 8 EXT DRXVgWA'JI MORN IHG Sam stops the car, cuts the engine and climbs out. The neighbouring houses are all as big as Sam's, As Sam prepares to wash the car a NEIGHBOUR cruises by in a new Range Rover, Sam looks up and waves to him. He waves back. SAM (V,Q.) I would have worked but we didn't need the money. Sam attaches a special brush to the hose, turnff on th,ewater and proceeds to wash his carl SAM (V.8,) When I left Japan the yen was sky high. On Julie's advice I put everything 5 had into real estate,

9 INT JULIE'S QFFTCE DAY 9 Julie sits behind a big desk in a big office overlooking downtown Surfers Paradise, She is talking on the phone, On the wall behind her are framed photographe of the children, as babies, and as they are now in their early twenties. Alongside the photographs are frmed certificates confirming her credentials as a Financial Adviser, her BA in Commerce, her proficiency in Japanese. Her office walls are adorned with glossy pictures of the investment unit developments she is currently marketing, On the shelves below are models of the developments in perspex boxes,

SAM(V,Q. ) My wife was a financial adviser, She apecialised in planning for retiremnt, so most of her clients were retired, like me. 10 INT JULIE'S OFFICE DAY 10 Julie sits opposite an MIDDLE-AGED COUPLE who are listening attentively to her explanation of the graph on her computer screen. The couple both look worried, JULIE So what we end up with is a shortfall, if you are to maintain your current standard of living, of around two million dollars. She gives them a cheerful smile, coqletely misplaced in the circumstances. JULIE Which is where I come in. 11 IMT JULIE'S QFPZCE DAY 11 Julie sits opposite a middle-aged JMANESE COUPLE. She explains exactly the same graph to them. and draws exactly the same conclusion, this time in Japanese. This couple looks just as worried as the last. JULTE (IN JAPWESE) Which is where I come in. 12 EXT STREET DAY 12

Julie's red BMW pulls up in front of a development site, She gets out and runs around to let out an ELDERLY COUPLE, They stand by the car gazing at the huge sign at the front of the site, which shows an artist's impression of the luxury apartments under construction there, SELLING FAST the sign proclaims, Julie stands beneath it spruiking, doing the sales pitch, smiling all the while. The elderly couple strain to hear above the deafening construction noise behind her. 13 EXT STREET DAY 13

Julie's BW is parked out the front of another development, this one almost finished. Julie ushers a CHINESE COUPLE into the demountable display unit at the front of the building and closes the door behind them.

14 INT DXSPLAY UNIT KITCHEN DAY I4

Julie guides them around the display pointing out its features. JULIE European appliances in the kitchen, All state of the art. The Chinese couple is impressed.

15 INT DISPLAY UNIT BATHROQM DAY Julie points to the spa bath. JULTE Spa bath. Italian tiles throughout. The Chinese couple nod their approval.

16 TNT DGSPLAY UNIT SALES OFFXCE DAY 16 Later they peer at the elaborate brochure Julia holds open before them, showing floor plans and prices. JULIE There are actually no sub penthouses left* They ware snapped up very fast. I guess because they were so reasonably priced, The couple is obviously disappointed. JULIE There is one penthouse left. Which, if you bought it now off the plan we can do for,, She writes down a figure and pushes it across the desk. The Chinese see it and cheer The figure reads $1.25 million,, SAM(V.0. ) Actually what she did was sell over- priced real estate to people who didn't know any better. A lot of them foreigners. And New Zealanders,

MONTAGE : One after the other the couples we have seen sign on the dotted line while Julie watches, a radiant smile on her face.

SAM(V.0. ) The banks seemed happy enough to lend them the money.

MONTAGE: One after the other the couples we have seen sign the mortgage papers with the bank, with the smiling LOANS OFFICER looking on. 17 INT KITCHEN EVENING 17 Sam expertly slices ultra fresh sashimi tuna and arranges it beautifully on a dish. He dips a slice in soy sauce and drops it into his mouth,

SAM(V.O. ) She made a very good living at it. I wasn't complaining. It had always been my dream to be a real family man. 18 INT DINING ROOM EVENING 18 Sam sits at the head of the big dining table with his son BEN on one side and his daughter NAOMI on the other. Julie sits up the other end of the table. They all eat with chopsticks, passing the dishes back and forth, for everyone to help themselves. Nobody speaks for a long moment. JULIE Isn't this nice. No one responds. JULIE To all to be together. Naomi and Ben exchange a hostile glance. Julie raises her glass. JULIE Charge your glasses. Sam fills the children's glasses and his own with wine. They a11 raise their glasses, NAOMI What are we drinking to? JULIE Me, There is a silence. Naomi grimaces, waiting for her mother to explain. She can't stand Julie's little ceremonies.

JUL JE Two million dollars worth of sales this week. She pauses.

JULIE f CONT 'D ) Again. They all drink to that, BEN New car. NAOMI Business class to Paris. BEN Get lost. NAOMI You get lost. What's wrong with the car you've got? JULXE Stop it both of you, They ignore her. NAOMI That's the only reason you ever come horn@. BEN Yeah, yeah. Like you don't, NAOMX What's that supposed to mean? BEN Fuck you. SULfE Ben l He glares at his mother.

BEN She always does that! Makes out that I'm only interested in money. NAONI Because it's true,

BEN Shut the Tuck up will youl JULIE (SGrnrnSNG)Stop! She looks to Sam for help, We seems not to be Listening. He takes a mouthful of rice and chews.

JULIE Your father has cooked us a beautiful meal. Srn As usual, Julie takes offence. JULIE What's that supposed to mean? Sam says nothing. JULIE I'm out working all day. He expects me to come home and cook as well? Sam says nothing, Naomi starts to shake her head in disbelief. Why do all of their meals turn out like this? JULIE It's not as if he's got anything else to do! She takes a mouthful of food and chews hard. BEN (to JULIE)Why do you always do that? JULIE Do what? BEN Talk about dad as if he isn't there, Julie looks as if she's about to cry. She glares at Ben. JULIE Because he isn't! She glares at Sam, her eyes brimming with tears. He looks up from his plate at her and keeps chewing, his expression maddeningly calm, 19 JNT STUDY NIGHT 19 Later Julie is at her desk doing accounts. Naomi sits opposite her, reading a travel guide to Paris, Julie takes out her cheque book and signs a cheque. Smiling, she hands it over to Naomi. JULIE Don't tell your father, Naomi Jooks at the cheque then kisses it, giggling.

JULIE f gave the same amount to Ben.

NAOMI We hasn't passed one examl JULIE Neither have you. Naomi shrugs.

NAOMT Don't tell dad. They exchange a smile.

20 INT LIVING ROOM NIGHT 20 Sam sits in front of the television watching a satellite broadcast from NPlK Japan. It is a popular music program, an over- produced cabaret show, very nostalgic, the Japanese equivalent of chanson. Sam is enjoying it. Ben walks into the room, stands in front of the screen and shakes his head disapprovingly.

BEN Bow can you watch this crap?

He changes the channel,

Be falls onto the sofa to watch the Saturday movie.

Sam says nothing. After a moment he gets up and leaves the room.

21 INT BATHROOM NIGHT 2 1

Sam, in his pyjamas, stands at the mirror brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush.

He watches himaelf in the mirror, Saru(V.0. ) It was just that I didn't know how much longer I could go on with the feeling that my life was over. 22 INT BEDROOM NIGHT 22 Julie is sitting up in bed reading a glossy brochure on one of investment unit developments. Ben climbs in beside her, He reaches out and slips his hand into her nightdress to squeeze her breast. Without taking her eyes off the brochure she removes his hand. He rolls onto his side facing away from her and settles his head on the pillow, His eyes still open he stares at the wall.

SAM(V.0, ) Sometimes the thought crossed my mind that I might be better off dead. 23 INT LIVING ROON NIGHT 23 Sam sits on the sofa in the dark, He has a gun pointed at his temple. He doesn't dare to breathe. His finger rests on the trigger. His hand starts to shake. He lowers the gun. He gulps in a mouthful of air. He gets up and opens the drawer of an antique Japanese box, He puts the gun away and closes the drawer softly. Beside the box is a photograph of himself with the two kids when they were small. They are smiling. The sight of them brings tears to his eyes.

SAM(V.0. ) But I still, in some part of me, believed that things would get better soon. (MORE) SAM(V.0. ) (cont'd) That something would happen to make me wake up out of this dream life we were living. 24 INT HALLWAY NIGHT Sam pads down the corridor on his way back to bed.

SAM(V.0. ) And I was right. It did. Just in time. 25 EXT KEITH'S PATIO DAY 25 Sausages blacken on the barbecue. KEITH turns them with his tongs. Re is wearing an apron with breasts and bikini bottoms drawn on it. It stretches over his full paunch. He has a beer in his hand, which he sucks on.

SAM(V.0. ) The only friends we saw on a regular basis were my wife's partner Keith Di Bella and his wife Ainslie, Ainslie, naked under a wet see through shirt, lies back on a sun lounge pouring herself another glass of wine. She is well away.

SAM(V.0. ) They were nice people. Most Australians are, Ainslie slops some wine into Sam's glass, He sits beside her with his sunglasses an, fully clothed. She grins at him, AINSLIE You look Pike you're blind. Sam turns to her, his eyes invisible behind the glasses. He smiles. AINSLJE I never know what you're thinking. Ainslie looks at Julie. She is watching Keith. AINSLlIE He's very zen isn't he. Julie turns to look at Sam. JULIE 1s that what it is, (beat)X. thought he was dead. Ainslie giggles, Julie sips her drink. She is tense.

26 EXT PATIO DAY 26

Later they are sitting at the patio table, each with a plate in front of them. Keith hands a platter of blackened sausages and chops to Sam, He declines to take one, passing it across to Julie Sam helps himself to a bird size helping of green salad. Keith watches. KEITH Have some chops Sam. You never eat properly. sm I'm fine thanks. Be smiles behind his glasses. KE ITB You'd think I was trying to poison you *

JULIE There's a thought. Ainslie giggles, Julie glances at Keith, Sam picks at his salad. KEITH Never trust a thin man, AIMSLIE Leave him alone, You're just jealous, She bites into a sausage. Keith glares at her. She shrugs her shoulders at him, SAN I 'm not hungry. KEITH Coming out with us today? SAN No, Keith stares at him. KEITH Busy? SAN Yes.

Keith and Julie exchange a glance, Smsees them from behind his glasses.

Srn(V.0. ) They were weekend sailors. Sam smiles. 27 EXT JETTY DAY 27

Smhelps Julie to cast off* Keith is up on the bridge of a flash over-sized cruiser. Not a sail in sight,

S~(V*0.) I don't like sailing. I get seasick. Be and Julie exchange a hostile glance. Sam stands on the jetty and watches as the massive outboard engines rev up. sm(V.0,) They never minded if I stayed behind. They preferred it. Julie climbs up to join Keith on the bridge. t

SAM (CQMT'D) They found me hard work, although they never said so. On the bow Ainslie trips drunkenly on a rope and nearly falls overboard. she rights herself and blows Sam a kiss, He waves to her. The cruiser pulls away into the middle of the canal. Qn the bridge Keith whispers something in Julie's ear. She turns to go below deck, As she does so Ksith squeezes her on the bum, not bothering to hide the gesture from Sam. Sam stares, fixated on the vision of Keith's hand on Julie's bum.

Srn(V.0. ) E: knew Julie and Keith were more than partners, I wasn't stupid, although it must have looked that way to a Lot of people,

EXT NEIGHBOUR's LAW WAY

A couple of houses down from Keith's a NEIGHBQUR looks up from watering a dying sapling in his otherwise bare garden. Be sees Keith on the bridge of his boat and waves, Rsith waves back, Me sees Ainslie struggling to stay upright on the deck below. She waves After the boat has passed the neighbour sees Sam standing on the je ty staring after it.

28 EXT JETTY DAY 28 Sam watches the boat until it turns a corner and vanishes.

SAM(V.Q. ) I still had problems with the language, after nearly fifteen yea.rs, I had some bad habits.

29 INT LSLY'S RESTAUMNT KITCHEN DAY 29

A huge vat of soup stock bubbles away on the back burner in the kitchen of Lily's Viatnmiese restaurant, Chicken carcasses and pork bones rise and dip in the grey murky liquid, 30 INT LILY'S RESTAURANT DINING ROOM DAY 30 Sam sits at a table, his hands resting on the grimy plastic table cloth. He notices some spilled soy, takes a napkin from the tidy all containing sauces and chopsticks, and wipes up the spill. He looks up and surveys the d6cor. He is momentarily fascinated by a picture on the wall. It moves electronically. It shows a waterfall in which the water appears to be flowing. He glances over at the only other occupied table in the room. A PREGNMT GIRL talks on her mobile. Her GIRLFRIEND sips on a sweet bean drink. Sam glances through to the kitchen where LILY is stirring the soup stock, Sitting on a milk crate next to the fridge is her HUSBAND. He is complaining to Lily in Vietnamese. A cigarette dangles from his lips. Lily argues back. Lily's loutish SON emerges from the kitchen with a plate full of bean sprouts, mint and lemon slices, He puts it down in front of Sam, Sam smiles. SAM Can I have the Chinese tea. Sam's intonation is sometimes difficult to pick up, It doesn't help that he mutters. The son frowns, unable to understand. SAM The Chinese tea? SON I'm sorry? SAM Can I have the tea? Lily looks up from preparing Sam's soup as the son gives up on Sam and goes over to sit next to his pregnant wife, Lily shouts from the kitchen, LILY (in VIETNAMESE)Tea! The son, irritated, shouts back.

SON (in VIETNAMESE) You get it! Lily brings Sam's soup to him and places it in front of him. They exchange a smile.

SAM(V.0. ) Lily understood. Lily goes off to get the tea,

SAM (CONT'D) She had worse problems than the language. Sam watches Lily work around the husband who refuses to move out of her way as she reaches for a teapot. He deliberately knocks her causing a teapot to crash to the floor and shatter. Silently Lily takes another pot and goes to fill it with boiling water.

Sa-lra(V.0. ) A husband who gambled. Sam watches the son whispering in his girlfriend's ear, nibbling her earlobe.

And a son who should have been studying to be an accountant but got distracted. Sam takes a. spoon and some chopsticks. He prods his soup with their tips.

He stares down into the steaming bowl, Lily places his tea down on the table, with a teacup. She waits for Sam to spoon some soup up into his mouth to taste it. He smiles up at her and nods approval. Happy, I,ily turns and goes back into the kitchen. Sam spoons some more soup into his mouth. He then lifts some noodles up to his lips with his chopsticks, blows on them and slurps them in. SAM (V*O*) Lily's wasn't the best soup on the coast. It tasted like tears, Ae eats with great enjoyment. SAM (CONT'D) But % kept going back there, Something about the place reminded me of my youth. 31. INT NOODLE STALL EVENING 31 A brief flashback of YOUNG SAN as a green schoolboy, On a hot sumer's night in Tokyo he sits slurping noodles at a hole in the wa1.l noodle stall. A couple of feet in front of him the STAZLEOLDER'S WIPE leans over a vat of soup stock revealing a sweating cleavage. He stares at her glistening, swelling breasts, As he eats Sam watches the sweat from her brow gather into a drop on her chin and fall into the stock. INT LILY'S RESTa3.U DAY Sam sweats as he eats Lily's hot soup. Lily watches him from the kitchen, a look of intense longing on her face,

SAM(V.0. ) Maybe I just liked Lily.

Sam looks up as Lily's twelve year old daughter WGELA breezes in, carrying her violin and her music books. Re watches her go to the fridge and help hereslf to a soft drink. She swings around and sees Sam, She smiles at him. Sam bems back. SAM(V.0, ) I definitely liked Angela. He wipes his mouth with a napkin. SAM Good lesson? She nods, Her smile is dazzling.

SaPl (V,O.) There was something special about Angela. Angela does possess a peculiarly pure radiance. She is painfully beautiful, 32 IWT BEDROOM DAY 32 Sam lies on his bed in the late afternoon, deeply asleep.

SAM(V,O, ) I used to dream I was her father and Lily was my wife. In his dream Angela is standing in his living room playing the violin. Lily is standing behind him with her hands on his shoulders. They listen to Angela and watch her play like proud parents,

SAM(V-0.) I don't know why, Dreams are a mystery to me, Lily takes Sm's head in her hands and bends it back. She whispers something in his ear and nibbles his earlobe.

SAM(V*O,) But I remember waking up from the dream with the feeling that I was wanted, For who S was. Sam kisses Lily's hand. SAM (CONT'D) Not for who I was pretending to be. 33 IMT BEDROOM EVENING 33 The radio alarm beside Sam's bed plays a violin concerto, the one from his dream. Sam blinks hard and looks at the time. Five-thirty. Be stares at the ceiling and smiles.

SAM(V*O, ) Which gave me a real sense of hope. Even when X was awake, 34 EXT JETTY EVENING 34 At sunset Sam is waiting on the jetty. He watches Keith's cruiser come into view, 35 EXT BOAT EVENING 35 Keith stands on the bridge, He looks like death. 36 EXT JETTY EVENING 36

Smtakes one look at Keith as the boat pulls in to the jetty and is immediately afraid.

SAM(V.0. ) As soon as I saw Keith 1 could tell something was wrong. He was as white as a sheet.

Keith and Sam exchange a glance. There is something i.mploring in Keith's expression. Sm at a loss as to how ta respond. Keith scrambles down to attend to the wopes. Sam helps him to tie the boat up then climbs on board and goes to Julie's side. Julie looks at him and imediately bursts into sobs. He tries to put his arms around her but she Eights him off. KEITH Get her inside, Keith glances around, afraid they axe being observed. He comes and puts a strong arm around Julie, He frog marches her off the boat and up the jetty. Sam follows uselessly behind. He glances back at the boat to look for Rinslie. She is nowhere in sight, KEITH (mGRV) Just get inside! Sam scrambles after Julie and Keith, Julie is muttering incoherently. JULIE Don't do that, You can't do that.

SAM(V*B.) X'd never seen Julie so agitated. She was an anxious woman. But not hysterical. Keith puts his band over her mouth and shoves her through the door into the house.

Srn(V.0. ) Not without a reagon. INT KELTH's HOUSE EVENING Keith sits Julie down on the sofa. KEITH Get her some water. Julie sits moaning as if in terrible pain, Keith kneels down beside her and strokes hsr hair. KEITH Ssshh, It's all right. Come on my sweet. Calm down. They gaze at each other, Sam enters with a glass of water. He hands it to Julie. She looks up at him as if at a stranger. Her face crumples again.

JULIE Oh God! She hugs herself and starts rocking back and forth. Keith takes the water from Sam and puts it down, We goes to draw the curtains, glancing outside to check that they haven't been observed, Sam sits down in an armchair and watches Julie sobbing. Keith goes to the drinks cabinet and pours himself and Sam a neat whisky. He hands a drink to Sam. Sam notices a bad bruise on Keith's trembling hand. He watches Keith sit down on the sofa next to Julie,

He puts his arm around Julie's shoulder. KEITH Ssshh. Come on. I need you to calm down. Julie starts to quieten down. Keith looks straight at Sam. KEITH We had an accident. Sam sips his drink.

Keith downs his drink in one gulp. JULIE (CRYING) It was an accident. Keith gets up and pours himself another drink, and one for Julie. Julie looks at Sam. JULIE You have to help us. Sam stasex at her dumbly. Keith gives her a drink. He remains standing. He starts to pace, Sam doesn't take his eyes off Julie. SAM Help you what? Julie looks to Keith for help. KEITH Were's the story. Sam looks at him, He comes and sits on the arm of Sam's chair and puts a strong hand on Sam's shoulder. Sam continues to stare at his wife, She avoids looking at him. KEITH Ainslie was drunk at lunch. He pauses to think. KEITH She decided she didn't want to go out today. It was too hot. We squeezes Sam's shoulder. KEITH (CONT'D) And you didn't want Julie to go out. SAM Why not? KEITH S don't know! You tell me? Sm I didn't mind. KEITH For fuck's sake! What's the matter with you? Sam watches Julie. SAM What did I say? Julie glares at him. JULIE You're not listening. Listen! KEITH We didn't go out today okay? SAM Where's Ainslie? Julie looks at Keith. He swallows his drink. KEITH She was drunk.

SAM Where did she go? If she didn't go out with you? I saw her on the boat. JULIE She drowned. KEITH She drowned. We didn't go out. He can see now how it will go when the police question him. KEITH She must have gone for a swim in the canal. JULIE While you were asleep. KEITH I woke up and she was gone.

JULIE A shark took her.

KEITH There are sharks in the canal. There was a guy a couple of months ago. Lost a leg.

Sam looks at him.

SAM I saw her on the boat.

Keith looks at Julie,

KEITH Tell him.

JULIE It'll be all right.

They gaze at each other.

JULIE I need a couple of hours,

KEITH I'll wait 'ti1 the morning,

JULIE What will you say?

KEITH She walks up to the Casino sometimes and stays late. Drinking. Maybe she went swimming after that. She has before.

Julie and Keith both get up and walk towards each other, They meet in the middle of the room and embrace, They hold onto each other desperately.

JULIE Ring me, KEITH When I've talked to the police. Sam sips his drink and looks away. Across the canal he can see into the living room opposite where a family is watching television,

37 IMT CAR EVENING 37 Sam drives in silence, Julie beside him. After a long moment Julie speaks. JULXE She caught us. Sam says nothing. JULIE She was asleep on the beach,

38 EXT ISLAND DAY Keith's launch is tied up at jetty on an island in the Broadwater, a few metres off the shore. Ainslie lies on the sand sunbaking, asleep. Beside her are two empty towels. She wakes up and sees that Keith and Julie have gone off without her. She sits up and looks in her bag for something, She empties the bag out on the sand and picks up an empty tube of sunscreen. She tries to squeeze some crem from it but nothing comes. She tosses the bag aside, stands up and wades out into the water, She swims towards the boat,

39 INT BOAT DAY 39 Keith and Julie are having noisy sex up against the wall below deck, Julie glances up at the shaday figure blacking the sun in the doorway, It is Ainslie, dripping wet from her swim* She is clutching a fire extinguisher, about to launch it at Keith's back. a

40 JNT CAR EVENING 40 Julie stares at the road ahead, at the headlights streaming towards them.

SULf E She started screaming at Keith. She said she'd go to the papers and tell them everything she knew about the business. 4 1 INT BOAT DAY 41 Ainslie hurls the fire extinguisher at Keith, It hits him in the bask of the head. Re falls, Ainslie springs at him and starts slapping him as he struggles to get up. AINSLIE You fucking shit! 1'11 kill you! Julie scrambles around after the fire extinguisher. She grabs hold of it, AINSLIE 1'13. tell them how you make your money ! Keith manages to get the bett-er of her. He pins her against the wall, She is hysterical. AINSLTE 1'11 tell you how you rip people off! Keith slaps her hard across the mouth. She grabs hold of a fistful of his hair and pulls hard. He punches her hand away. She grabs his hand and slarras the fingers in a drawer almost bre king them. KEITH Fuck! Fuck? Fuckl He doubles over in pain, clutching his hand. Ainslie goes for Julie, AINSLIE You bitch? Julie raises the fire extinguisher and slams it into Airislie's face, breaking her nose and leaving a circular mark on her cheek. Ainslie falls back. Her head cracks hard on the edge of the table. She slumps to the floor* Julie crawls across to Keith who is crumpled up in a corner nursing his hand. JULIE Let me Look. She tries to Look at his hand. He won't let her touch him, She crawls over to Aina1i.e and looks at her. 'There is blood coming out of her ear, Julie looks closer. Ainslie isn't breathing. JULIE Ainslie? She takes hold of her shoulders and shakes her* JULIE Jesus. Ainslie, 42 INT CAR EVENING Julie has tears in her eyes. JULIE It was an accident. Sam drives in silence, JULIE I panicked,

SAM (IN JmWESE) I don't understand. Julie glares at him. JULIE She's a partner. She knows everything. What's hard to understand? SAKI Where is she? Julie turns away and stares out the window. Her tears spill over and course down her cheeks. 43 EXT OUT AT SEA DAY 43 Julie stands at the wheel. She slows the boat and lets the engine idle. She glances behind her. Keith is struggling to carry Ainslie's body up the stairs and onto the deck, Be collapses under the weight of it, spilling Ainslie onto the deck. KEITH You have to help me. Julie leaves the bridge and goes down to join him. JULIE What are you doing? Keith lifts Winslie's upper half. KEITH Take her legs. Julie takes the Legs. She can't bear to look at Ainslie's half naked corpse but she can't bear to look away. Keith edges closer to the side. JULIE What are you doing? Keith manages to rest the upper body on the edge of the boat. Julie still has hold of the legs. She realises he is throwing the body overboard. JULIE You can't. Keith comes to take the legs from Julie. She resists him, They struggle over possession of the legs, JULIE You can't do that, KEITH Move ! He pushes her away. He heaves the body over the side. Julie is horrified. She peers over the side and watches the body sink briefly, then bob up again. Keith goes downstairs and returns with the fire extinguisher. He hurls it as far as he can out to sea. The body bobs in the water. JULIE It's floating. KEITH Fuck, He grabs hold of a pole and pokes at the body, trying to push it under the water. JULIE You should have tied something to it. Ainslie's body swings around and her face rises horribly out of the water, the circular wound on her cheek clearly visible, her sightless eyes boring into Julie. Julie promptly rushes to the back of the boat and throws up. Keith prods the body down under the water again. He jabs at it, pushing it away furiously until it is too far away for him to reach. A wave swamps it and it disappears from sight. Keith rushes up to the bridgo and pumps the engines, He turns the boat back towards land and speeds away. Julie lies curled up on the deck.

44 TNT CAR EVENING 44 Julie is crying again. Sam pulls up at a red light,

JULIE What have P done? He says nothing. She starts to whimper.

JUL IE Oh God. You have to help me, Sam stares at the road ahead. The Lights change to green. He pulls away,

45 EXT ROAD EVENING 45

The retreating rear lights of the black Mercedes shine like two red ayes in the gloom.

46 EXT JETTY NIGHT 46

The Light on the jetty illminates Keith's boat, It is rocking gently. 24 dim light shines froari inside the cabin.

47 fNT BOAT NIGHT 47 Below deck Keith works in the cabin with a bucket and scrubbing brush to remove any traces of Ainslie's blood from the table and floor. Be scrubs so hard the boat rocks with his movement. The strain shows on his face. His hand is sti.11 very painful, Be knocks it on the table leg,

KEZTH Fuck!

48 EXT JETTY NIGHT 48

Keith works on the outside of the boat, hosing it down until it gleams. 49 INT BATHROOM NIGHT 49 Julie stands under a shower letting the water beat down on her head. She takes the soap and starts to scrub herself violently all over.

50 INT SAM'S Kf TCBEN MIGHT 50

A saucepan full of rice porridge bubbles way on the stove. Sam turns off the heat, takes a spoonful of rice, tastes it. He takes a couple of eggs and scrambles them, then pours them over the porridge, He puts a lid on the pan to let the eggs steam.

He prepares two bowls.

51 INT DINING ROOM NfGHT 51 Sam and Julie sit opposite each other at the large dining table. Sam holds his bowl up and eats his rice porridge with enjoyment.

SAM (IN JAPANESE) It's good. Julie plays with her food instead of eating it,

52 INT BEDROOM MIGHT 52 Julie lies in bed, curled up like a baby. She stares at the wall, Sam comes in from the bathroom in his pyjamas. Be sits on her side of the bed and watches her. He reaches out and puts his hand on her shoulder. JULIE Don't,

He withdraws his hand. He sits quietly for a moment, staring at the floor. 53 INT LIVING ROQM NIGHT 53 Sam sits in front of the television watching the Japanese singing on satellite, It is as schmaltzy as ever. 54 INT FRONT HBfsLWAY DAY 54 The next morning Sam opens the front door to two detectives NOBLE and BURPJETT. SAM Come in. The detectives come in. They look around in admiration at the house and the furniture. Sam looks down at their shoes. His and Julie's shoes are neatly arranged in rows just inside the door.

SAM Would you mind to take your shoes off. The detectives oblige. One of them, the older man Burnett, reveals holes in his sock8 which he tries to hide. The younger man, Noble offers his hand to Sam. NOBLE I'm detective inspector Noble. This is inspector Burnett, We spoke on the phone, SAM My name is Sam Makadai, They shake hands. Sam offers his hand to Burnett, They shake hands. IBUWNETT Lovely house you have,

SAM Thank you, They go through to the breakfast room off the kitchen, The detectives continue to peer around them, looking for clues as to who Sam and Julie might be. SAM Please sit down. They take a seat. Julie appears in the kitchen, freshly showered, smartly dressed, no sign of yesterday's trauma, She smiles at the detectives, JULIE I've just made some coffee. BUKNETT waits for NOBLE to reply, NOBLE Thanks. That would be good. 55 INT KITCHEN DAY 55 Sam helps Julie to set a tray for coffee. He notices her hand trembling as she sets the full cups down on their saucers. Re puts his hand over hers to indicate that he will take charge. 56 INT BREAKFAST ROOM DAY 56 Julie and Sam watch Burnett and Noble sip their coffee. Noble is very well dressed. He is not your average policeman. He speaks well, has a sense of style. Julie pushes the sugar towards Noble. He looks at her. She smiles at him, almost flirtatiously. Burnett takes a biscuit and bites into it noisily. He brushes the crumbs from his shirtfront. JULIE How long has she been missing? NOBLE We don't know she is missing. Julie stops smiling. NOBLE How long have you known Mrs Di Bella?

Burnett takes out a notebook and starts making notes. Sam watches him.

JULIE For as long as I've been working with Keith. Over two years.

NOBLE Mr Di Bella says you and your husband were at their place yesterday.

JULIE We had lunch there.

SAM A barbecue.

NOBLE What time did you leave?

Sam and Julie look at each other.

SAM About two thirty.

JULIE We came home.

SAM For a siesta.

Noble looks at Sam and smiles.

SAM(V.0. ) They believed me,

Sam smiles back.

SAM(V.0. ) I have often been told I have an honest face.

Noble sips his coffee. NOBLE Hirune, Sam and Julie look surprised. This is the Japanese word for siesta. Noble chuckles* He is enjoying himself, Me likes Sam. NOBLE (TO SAP3 IN JBPmESE) I speak a little Japanese. But pretty badly,

SAP? (IN JWMESE) Have you been to Japan? Burnett is at a loss. He stops taking notes, NOBLE f went on a Rotary exchange when 1 was at school. To Gifu. JULIE So did I, To Saitama. NOBLE I did a bit at university, There is an awkward pause, This changes things, as Noble knew would. NOBLE Mr Di Bella now says that his wife pestered him to take her out on their boat yesterday, even though you had all decided it was too hot. Julie doesn't know what to say.

SAM ft was very hot. Burnett starts taking notes again. NOBLE A neighbour saw them leaving at about three, Julie takes a sip of her coffee. Her hand is trembling almost imperceptibly, but enough for Noble to be aware of it. NOBLE He says she didn't want you two to come, She finds you hard going. Julie looks out the window, apparently offended. Sam glances at her, then back at Noble. SBM What is hard-going? Burnett smiles to himself. NOBLE (IN JAPANE$E) What would you say in Japanese 1 wonder.

We starts to list possible expressions, a game that Sam readily joins in. Meanwhi-le Burnett and Julie stare at each other uneasily, Something about Burnett frightens Julie.

SAM(V.0, ) Keith wasn't so Lucky, He couldn't get his story straight.

57 INT POLICE INTERVIEW ROOM DAY 57 Noble sits opposite Keith in a bare interview room down at the station,

SW(V.0. ) The pressure got to him.

Burnett stands i-at the window with his arms folded looking dangerous. Keith glances from Noble to Burnett and back again. He is flustered.

KEITH She'd been drinking all day.

Neither Noble nor Burnett says anything. Keith looks down at his hands, He covers the bruise on his left hand with his right, KEITH She must have fallen overboard, No response, KEITH S thought she was asleep down below. NOBLE Row long were you out an the boat? KEITH 'Ilm.. Maybe three hours. We got back about six. NOBLE When did you realise she wasn't on board? KEITH As soon as we got back. I realised str~ightaway. NOBLE But you didn't report her missing until the morning, Keith glances at Burnett, then at Noble, KEITR (SOFTLY) No. NOBLE Fltay not?

Keith Looks as if h.ets about to cry, We shakes his head, unable to utter a sound.

58 EXT ROCKS DAY 58 A FLSWE rounds a corner of the headland at Nobby's Beach and spies something odd caught between the rocks at the water's edge. Me approachee cautiously and sees first an arm, then a sh.ouldeac, then a naked breast, then an entire female corpse. Half an hour later the fisherman is standing on the rocks beside a uniformed POLICEWOMAN pointing at the spot where he found the body, explaining what he saw. 59 EXT BEACH DAY 59 Up on the sand Noble and Burnett stand beside the body, peering under the sheet that it is wrapped in. Ainslie's corpse is grey and waterlogged, but the round wound on her cheek is still clearly visible, Burnett looks at it closely then at the wound just behind her ear, Noble comes to his side, They both look at the wound. A couple of AMBULANCE ATTENDANTS lift the body onto a stretcher and carry it away to a waiting ambulance. A small crowd of ONLOOKERS has gathered on the sand to watch. 60 INT POLICE INTERVIEW ROOM DAY 60 Sam sits opposite Noble and reads through a page long statement. NOBLE Would you like a translation?

SAM No. This is fine. This is good. We didn't go on the boat. He signs the statement and pauses before handing it to Noble, NOBLE That's what it says. Sam hands him the statement. They exchange a smile. NOBLE Doomo arigatoo. SAM Doo itashimashite. 6 J INT POLICE INTERVIEW ROOM DAY 61 Julie sits opposite Noble reading through her statement. Once again her hands are unsteady enough for Noble to notice. JULIE This is fine. NOBLE Nothing you want to add or take away? Julie pauses to read through it all again. Noble picks up a pen and starts to tap it on the table. JULIE No. Noble hands the pen to Julie. She goes to sign but the tip of the pen is retracted. Flustered she gives the pen a violent shake. Noble holds out his hand to stop her. He gently takes the pen out of her hand, clicks the end, then hands it back. She signs, She looks up at Noble, He smiles at her, She smiles back, but nervously. NOBLE Thank you. 62 INT COURTROOM DAY 62 Sam and Julie sit side by side in the courtroom, surrounded by a scattering of other SPECTATORS. Keith makes his way to the witness stand to give evidence. He is sworn in by a BAILIFF and takes his seat, The PROSECUTOR takes her time before approaching him. She glances at the notes on her desk, writes in the margins, wastes time while Keith sweats in the stand. The JUDGE watches the prosecutor with growing impatience. SAM(V.0, ) To give him credit he kept Julie out of it the whole way. He never told them she was on the boat. The prosecutor starts to question Keith starting with the day in question.

Sar/l(V.O. ) They had no reason to doubt it was him who pushed Ainslie over and made her hit her head. KEITH It was an accident. Julie covers her mouth with her hand to stop herself from crying out.

SAM(V.0. ) He said they were arguing about money. KEITH Doesn't everyone? A few of the JURY MEMBERS give an involuntary smile. Noble and Burnett watch proceedings from their seats.

SAM(V.0. ) This time they figured he must be telling the truth. PROSECUTOR And what did you do with your wife's body when you realised she was dead. Keith glances at Julie. She still has her hand over her mouth. There are tears in her eyes. They exchange a look of pure love. KEITH 1 threw it over the side. Keith glances at the jury members. None of them smile now. PROSECUTOR On your own? Keith looks at her. He blinks, unable for a moment to understand the question. PROSECUTOR It must have been very heavy. KEITH It was. Julie starts to mutter something to herself. Sam looks at her, She is crying. She takes her hand away from her mouth. JULIE (MUTTER1NG)I have to say something. Sam grabs her roughly by the arm to quieten her down. JULIE I have to help him. Sam gets up and drags Julie with him out of the room. Noble glances up at them as they leave, taking note of Julie's distress. 63 INT COURTHOUSE LOBBY DAY 63 Sam takes Julie by the hand and hurries her through the courthouse lobby. She is still mumbling to herself. JULIE It's your fault. None of it would have happened,.. SAM (IN JAPANESE) Keep your voice down. Sam drags Julie to a quiet corner of the lobby and sits her down roughly. She struggles to free her hand from his firm grip. SAM Calm down. Julia starts rocking back and forth, hugging herself, repeating the same thing.

JULIE I have to tell thems Sam sits down next to her and forces her to look at him. sm Look at me. She does. SAM Whatever you do or say now he is going to gaol, Think about it. You have two children. Julie looks atSam with. real hatred. JULIE It's your fault. Sam stares back at her, umved, JULIE You knew about Keith and me. You've known for months. And you never did anything about it. Sam says nothing. JULIE What kind of a man are you?! Sam says nothing, JULIE You never do anything!

Sam stares at her contemptuous face,

JULIE I hate yout 64 INT COURTHOUSE DAY 64 Sam and Julie are sitting in different rows of the courthouse on the day of sentencing, Noble enters and takes a seat at the back. The judge looks up from his desk and addresses Keith, JUDGE Arguing with your wife is one thing, Resorting to physical force against her is another, particularly when, as in this case, the result is real harm. Keith looks down at his hands. The bruise on his left hand is barely visible,

JUDGE: And then to callously dispose of her body in the way that you admit to having done, shows a total absence of feeling, which I find shocking. I am not sure that you are remorseful, You will have work to do to convince anyone that you feel anything, let alone remorse. You are a brutal, cold man. Sam stares at the back of Keith's head, In the row behind him Julie sobs into her handkerchief, Pn the back row Noble watches her sobbing into her handkerchief. JUDGE You are sentenced to ten years imprisonment, The prosecutor looks well satisfied. Julie flees from the room, Sam follows her, 65 TNT COURTMOUSE LOBBY DAY

Julie collapses into Sam's arms. We comforts her.

SaM(V.0. ) Tn the circumstances tha sentence was harsh. Maybe they thought a man in his position, with his connections to people in power, should have known better, should have set a standard.

Noble crosses the lobby. As he passes Sam they excha.nge a smile.

66 EXT PRSSON DAY 66 The walls of Keith's prison face the empty surrounding fields, Sam's black Mercedes approaches slowly down the only road in ~icqht,

67 INT CAR DAY 67

Sam turns slowly into the parking lot. A few other cars are scattered around the place. It is not a buay day, Julie sits beside him staring blankly ahead of her, Sm stops the engine. Neither of them moves. sm We're here, Julie looks out the window at the wall, She looks away again in a state of mild panic. sm Do you want me to ~0~1633 She shakes her head, SAbl (IN JAPWESE) I'll wait here, Without looking at him she steels herself, opens her door, gets out and marches away towards the front gate. 68 INT PRISON VISITING ROOM DAY 68 Julie sits opposite Keith in the visitor's room. She looks completely bereft. Keith looks grey and defeated. They gaze into each other's eyes, JULIE I miss you so much. KEITH Will you wait for me? JULIE I think about you every minute. They both have tears in their eyes. 69 INT CAR DAY Sam sits in the car reading the Gold Coast Bulletin.

SAM(V.0. ) As a result of the publicity surrounding the case the details of Keith and Julie's property dealings were splashed all over the papers for weeks, On the front page is a photograph of Keith under a headline reading GAOLED DEVELOPER LINK TO MARKETEERING SCAM.

SAM(V.0. ) Not that any of it was news to anyone. Sam reads the story inside. Beside it is a photograph of Keith and Julie in front of a development site. They are smiling. Keith has his arm around Julie's waist.

SAM(V.0. ) Schemes like theirs had practically built the Gold Coast. Everybody knew that. Sam takes a close look at the photograph. He stares at Keith's hand on Julie's waist. He stares so hard he can see nothing else. He sees again the vision of Keith's hand on Julie's bum as she stood on the bridge of the boat. INT BREAKFAST ROOM DAY 70 Julie sits at the breakfast table reading the employment section of the paper. She looks terrible. She smokes. She drains a glass of wine,

SAM(V.0. ) The new laws they brought in meant Julie had to look for another job. Julie circles a couple of telemarketing positions.

SA.M(V.0. ) There was no way she was going to retire. I was used to it. EXT CLOTHESLINE DAY 71 Sam finishes hanging out the washing, picks up his basket and goes inside. ZNT BREAKFAST ROOM DAY 72 Julie pours herself another glass of wine,

SAM(V.0. ) But Julie was like a trapped animal at home with me all day. She sips her drink. Sam comes in carrying the vacuum cleaner, He puts it down, He picks up the bottle of wine and takes it into the kitchen.

SAM(V.0. ) She said she felt I was silently accusing her all the time. Julie makes a face at Sam's back, poking out her tongue at him.

73 JNT KITCHEN DAY 73 Sam puts the wine in the fridge, He looks at the sink full of dirty dishes. He glances at Julie, still reading the paper. 74 INT BEDROOM MOWING 74 Julie gets dressed in her new telemarketing uniform. It barely fits, JULIE I'm getting so fat. Sam watches her in the mirror while he makes the bed,

Sm(v*O.) It wasn't true. I felt sorry for her, T always had, She was a very needy person. Sam comes to help her zip the back of hex tight skirt, She brushes him off. SAM Shall 1 make you some breakfas.t? JaIE I'm on a diet& She checks her rear view in the mirror.

SAm(V.O. ) She had never really wanted to leave Japan. She minces out of the room.

SAm(V.0, ) She missed being special. A foreigner, Sam watches hex walk away down the corridor, hobbled by the tightness of her outfit. SAM(V.0. ) She had always liked how she stood out in Japan. Without having to do anything. 75 EXT STREET DAY Julie backs out of the garage in her red sports car. She pulls into the road and speeds away,

76 INT CAR DAY 76 At the end of the street Julie pulls up. She takes a nip of liquor from a hipflask hidden in the glove box of the car then unwraps a mint and sucks on it.

SAM(V.0. ) Here it was different. Mere she was just like everyone else, trying to get along. Trying to fit in. She takes a deep breath and drives off. 77 METING COMPANY DAY 77 Julie sits in her cubicle talking into her headset, All around her rows and rows of other TEEE METERS sit in their cubicles, talking into their headsets. JULfE Nrs Wilson you are invited to take advantage of our free consultation. One hour of free financial advice by our trained consultant. AbsoLutely no obligation on you to take our advice, although if you should wish to follow up that free hour with a more detailed appraisal of your financial options in retirment,.

SWM(V.0. ) I had never been good at fitting in. That was probably the reason I married Julie in the first place, JULIE Thank you Mrs Wilson. Perhaps I could call you back at a more convenient time? No? Julie loses the caller. She hange her head for a moment, then in the next moment brightens up and dials the next nusober.

78 EXT BEACH WAX;KW;SI DAY 4 8 Sam strides along the pathway at a beachside park, Me passes ordinary PAlvlILIES enjoying a day out, Be lets a FATHER pass, cl-inging onto the seat of his little BOY'S bike. Sam watches the boy take off on his own, watches the! joy an the father's face, We walks on,

Sasvr(V.0. ) I was engaged to someone else at the time, my boss's niece. He never forgave me* He passes a COUPLE lying on a rug on the grass gazing into each others eyes.

Sslfu(V.0, ) Most days I had lunch at Lily's place, I'd walk there and back, It gave me a chance to see how everyone else lived,

He passes a RETXREB COUPLE on a rug having a picnic of sandwiches and tea.

SAM(V*O*) They seemed to do it without any effort, As if they never imagined being anyhere else,

EXT LILY'S RES DAY Sam reaches the door to Lily's restaurant. He gaes inside, INT LILY'S DAY Sam sits slurping up his noodles from a steaming hot bowl. The restaurant is almost deserted. Only one other table is occupied, by a VIETNAMESE TAXI DRIVER. Lily sits opposite Sam, smiling at him. From the back room comes the sound of Angela practicing her violin Sam stops to listen for a moment. Lily listens too. Angela gets through a very difficult passage without a hitch, SAM She's getting better. LILY Her teacher say she very clever. Lily looks around the tatty restaurant. LILY What I going to do? Sam finishes his soup and wipes his mouth. SAM What do you mean2 LILY If I have money I have no problem. No money big problem. She laughs. Sam laughs too.

SAM(V.0. ) Lily told me all the things she wanted to do to make the place a success. Lily chatters nine to the dozen. LILY I make a door to next door, Make a party room. SAM(V.0. ) She wanted a karaoke room. And a better colour on the walls. Sam surveys the grimy walls, taking a real interest. LILY White. SAM One red, At the back. Lily smiles sadly. LILY But no money! Sam laughs. Lily laughs. SAM Do you ever want to go home? Lily stops laughing. LILY Eh? SAM Back to Vietnam? Lily looks away, The taxi driver gets up. He leaves his money on the table. He says goodbye as he leaves. LILY (IN VIETNAMESE) See you tomorrow. Lily looks out the front window as the taxi driver climbs into his car and drives away. LILY No. This is good place for my family. She looks at Sam, She pours him some more tea. LILY How about you? Sam stares at the table, LILY You want to go back do Japan?

SAM No, He drinks his tea, SAM I'm like you, Ny family is here. LILY Sometime you look so lonely. We looks at her. She smiles at him, makes eyes at him,

sm(vda*) Her dream was to send Angela to a good school, where they took music seriously.

79 INT RESTAU T BXR ROOM DAY 79 Angela stands in the living room of the cramped back room flat playing her favourite violin piece. She is lost to the world*

SAM(V*O- ) Angela had wanted to be a vlolixrist since grade three. She'd seen a Japanese woman on television who played so beautifully it made her cry. mgela's brother l.ies; on ths fl.oor playing Nintendo with the sound turned down. He is completely oblivious to ths glorious sound coming from his si.sterts violin.

SAN(V*Q.) She wouldn't stop until Lily agreed to buy her the violin in the pawnshop window next door. 80 1NT DINING ROOM NIGHT 80 Sam and Julie sit opposite each other across the dining room table. They eat in silence. Sam slurps his soup and puts the empty bowl down being careful not to make too much noise.

SAM Good day?

Julie gives him a contemptuous look, JULIE It was terrific, Really exciting, I recornend telemarketing. It is such a rewarding careeri Julie's meal is only half eaten, She stacks the plates and takes them out to Sam continues to eat on his awn,

SM(V.0. ) I could have just asked Julie for the money. Everything was in her name.

He listens to Julie crashing plates into the sink. a1 INT KITCHEN NIG HT 81

Sam comes into the kitchen with his plates. Me puts them into the sink. Beside him Julie is stacking the dishwasher.

SAM You don't have to work,

Julie turns on him. She has a knife in her hand. She looks dangerous.

Srn Sf we're short of money we could sell the house. JULIE I will never ever sell this house! Do you hear me?! This house is everything I've ever wanted! I'm not going to let you force me out sf here! It's my home! Sam looks at her trembling hand with the knife in it.

SAPII(V.0, ) But I was afraid of her. I'd never seen her so angry. She raises the knife.

SAM I'm not trying to force you out of it, JULIE Rnd we're not short of money! Thank you for asking. I don't work for the money! I work bactkuse it's what I've always done! I'm not like you! I can't spend a whole day dustingl Srn I didn't mean... Julie stares at the knife in her hand for a moment then puts it into the dishwasher, 82 INT LIVING ROOM NIGHT 82 Sam and Julie sit watching television. Sam glances across at Julie, She is sound asleep with her mouth open.

SAM(V.0, ) I knew she'd ask questions I didn't have any answers to. He gets up and turns off the television, Ha stands over Julie, watching her sleep, Srn(V.0. ) Like who was Lily to me anyway? I didn't want Julie to jump to the wrong conclusions.

He nudges Julie's shoulder. She wakes with a start, giving a little squeal.

SAM You were asleep. She glares at him.

SAM(V.0. ) So I wrote her a note instead,

83 INT BREAKFAST TABLE DAY 83

Sam sits at the breakfast table putting the finishing touches to a blackmail note. Around him are scattered the remains of the Gold Coast Bulletin. He has chopped it up for letters to paste onto a sheet of paper,

Be cuts out a 'Of, puts paste in the back and sticks it on the note, changing $20,000 into $200,000. He reads through the note again,

'We know you lie to police. You pay $200,000 or we tell.'

He folds the note and puts it into a plain envelope. On the front, under Julie Nakadai, he writes his own address,

' 12 Wombat Crescent, Sorrento, Qld, 4216, Australia' He sticks a stamp in the corner, SAM(V.0. ) I posted it to her the next day,

86 EXT STREET DAY 86 Sam's Mercedes pulls up at a post box somewhere in the suburbs.

87 INT CAli DAY 87 Sam takes the letter from out of the street directory where he has hidden it, looks at the address, gets out of the car and walks across to the post box.

88 EXT STREET DAY 88 In another street Sam's car pulls up at a corner shopping centre. Re drives around to where the bins are and parks. 89 INT CAR DAY 89 Sam gathers up the cut up newspaper and shoves it into a rubbish bag. He is careful to pick up every scrap off the floor of the car. 90 EXT SHOPPING CENTRE DAY 90 Sam gets out of the car carrying the rubbish bag. Re hurls it into an industrial rubbish bin, INT LILY'S RESTAU DAY Sam waits for his soup noodles at Lily's. Through the kitchen door he can see Lily's husband in his usual spot on the milk crate. He is whining to Lily in Vietnamese. He sounds as if he's begging her forgiveness. Lily ignores him, She serves out Sam's soup noodles and carries them in to Sam. As Lily puts the noodles on the table in front of Sam the husband and Sam exchange a glance. Lily sits down opposite Sam as he starts to eat, She has a fresh black eye. SAM What happened? Lily looks at him and shrugs. LILY Did you ever want to kill someone? sm Never, LILY You a good man,

SAM No* They smile at each other.

91 EXT BEACH WmKWAY DAY 91 Sam walks home along the beachside footpath, Me sees FMILSES picnicking on the grasa. SAM (V.O.) I: knew what I was doing waa wrong. But b did it anpay, I don ' t know why, Haybe I wanted to punish Julie.

A COUPLE walks ahead of Sam. The man puts his hand on the woman's bum. Sahn stares.

sm(v.a. ) Naybe I just wanted to do something at last. To surprise myself, Me passes the couple,

92 EXT ST'MET DAY 92 Julie red car slowly approaches the prison along the only road in sight. SAtvl(V.0. ) The day she got the note she drove to the prison. Julie's car pulls up right at the front gates of the prison.

A PAT GUARD looks up from his desk in the gatehouse.

93 XNT CAR DAY 93

Julie takes a swig of the liquor she keeps in the glove box, She stares out of the front window at the massive prison gate.

94 EXT GUaRDHOUSE DAY 94

The fat guard reluctantly gets up from his desk, He comes out of the gatehouse and makes his way to the driver's side of Julie's car, As he bends down to speak to Julie a shot rings out, The guard 1ea.p~back in fright.

A couple of fellow GUARDS rush out to find out what's happening. The fat guard opens the door to the car. Julie's body falls sideways, hanging out of the car like a rag doll. There is blood trickling out of her left temple.

FAT GUARD Jesus Christ. Sam's gun falls from her hand and lands at the guard's feet.

He stares at it,

SAM(V.0, ) She used my gun, On the seat next to Julies' body, splattered in blood lies Sm's blackmail note,

SAM(V,O. ) In a letter to Keith she told him he was her one true love. She said she would wait for him in heaven. 95 INT KEITH'S CELL NIGHT 95 Keith lies on his narrow bed reading Julie's Letter to him, He curls up like a baby and sobs into his pillow.

96 INT DTNfNG ROOM NIGHT 96 Sam sits at the huge dining room table reading Julie's last letter to him, He is dry eyed.

Srn(V.0. ) In a letter to me she said I had been a wonderful father to the children but that I should have thought more about myself, 'You deserve to be happier than you are,' she said, He folds the letter up and puts it back into its envelope,

SW(V.O* ) Which was very kind of her, but in the circumstances, not true.

97 INT CREMATORIUM DAY 97 Sam sits dry-eyed in the crematorium staring at Julie's coffin. Ben and Naomi stand next to him, both in tears.

A few of Julie's WORmTES sit further back. Julie's MOTHER and SISTER sit a few seats away from Sam, weeping. Julie's BROTmR stands at the front beside Julie's coffin making an awkward speech, He has obviously not had much to do with his sister, BROTHER My sister was always striving to improve herself. Prom the time she was very young.

His voice falters. BROTHER (CONT'D) Whatever she did she threw herself into it, Heart and soul. I remember at school I was always envious of her ability to join in and contribute. Whether it was sport, or languages. Whatever she did. She was a natural leader. His tears get the better of him. He glances at his notes. His hands tremble. BROTHER (CONT'DJ She was a good sister. A good mother. A good wife... Naorni takes Sam's hand and squeezes it. He glances at her tearful face. Ben gives him a cold stare, 98 INT BEDROOM DAY 98 Sam sits alone on his bed. He has a framed photograph in his hands of Julie and the kids when they were little. He stares at ~ulie'slaughing face.

SAM(V.0. ) I'd never expected to outlive her. It came as a shock to think I was on my own. Naomi comes in and sits beside hims NAOMI Everyone's gone. SAM Thanks, I wasn't much use. NAOMI What are you going to do now? Sam puts the photograph back on the bedside table, SAM The first thing I have to do is sell the house. N'aomi is mortified. NAOMI You can't! SAM I need the money. NAOMI That's crap. You've got tons of money. SAM I don't like this house. Naomi is shocked again. NAOMI Dad I don't believe I'm hearing this. SAM It was your mother's house. Naomi stands in front of him screaming. He watches her, unmoved. NAOMI You shit! How can you be so cold! Hum worked her tits off to get you this house! She said you'd left Japan for her. It was the least she could do to buy you a beautiful house. Sam shakes his head. She has it all wrong. NAOMI A11 she ever did was think of you! Naomi glares at him. She is speechless for a moment, NAOMI Where am I going to stay when I come down to the coast?! What about Ben and me? This is our home! SAM I'll buy something smaller. A unit. NAONI You've planned it all already! You shit! Mum was right about you! She said you were a heartless bastard! Sam says nothing, Naomi stomps melodramatical2y out of the room, calling to Ben. NAOMI Ben! Ben! We're going to lose the house! We've lost our mother! Now we're going to lose our homo1

MONTAGE : Sam cleans the house from top to bottom. In his swimers he scrubs the bathrooms. In his Surfers Paradise tee shirt he whipper snips the edges. Be vacuums the living room carpet to within an inch of its life, On his hands and knees he scrubs the kitchen floor Japanese style, running up and down in a crouching position pushing a wet towel in front of him, Re gets down to check the shine on the floor, touching up a couple of spots he has missed.

99 INT FRONT B&LWAY MORNING 99 Sam, freshly showered and smartly dressed opens the door to a group of half a dozen RE& ESTATE AGENTS, four men, two women. A couple of them wear their company jackets, One or two carry clipboards. Eacla holds an informtion sheet describing the house,

SM Please come in. They come in as one, tsmooxpaq uanas xo x~s s~ 3MO JlMa3V

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*aurpa day3 KVM ay3 qno ~U~DPJ dx2eau dn saoys ay3 su~~oq u~op spuaq aH -lay qe sarTuIs WP$ AGENT TWO Six plus a study, plus a self- contained guest area. Agent One makes notes.

100 EXT =CONY DAY 100 The agents all gather on the bedroom balcony overlooking the river and Surfers skyline. Sam is with them. Be gazes at the view, The river gleams in the morning sun. The woman agent who approved of taking her shoes off turns to sm.

WO AGENT You'll miss this view. Sam smiles.

SWM Actually I'm a bit tired of it,

The agent smiles vacantly.

101 EXT GmDEN DAY 101

A decent CROW has gathered on the front lawn of the house on auction day.

It is a beautiful morning.

The AUCTLONEER is in the process of pushing tho price higher than the reserve*

AUCTIONEER The property is now on the market ladies and gentleman* We will have a sale today, An utterly outstanding Surfers Paradise landmark property. Psrfect in every detail. Beautifully main"eined and cared for. No expense spared in the design and concept,.. 102 INT BREAKFAST ROOM DAY 102 Sam sits alone at the breakfast table. He can see the crowd down on the lawn. He stares out at them, at the auctioneer, 103 EXT LAWN DAY 103 The WOM AGENT is standing next to Naomi and Ben on the grass. She is obviously well pleased, AUCTIONEER I have one million six hundred and fifty four thousand dollars once... He pauses. He catches the eye of another agent in the crowd. The agent has a word in the ear of the BIDDER standing next to him. The bidder shakes his head. He's out of the race. The agent nods to the auctioneer. AUCTIONEER Twice. The woman agent takes Naomi's hand and squeezes it, AUCTIONEER Sold! At one million six hundred and fifty four thousand dollars! Congratulations. Naomi gives a little jump for joy. Ben punches the air. BEN Way to go! 104 IMT BREAKFAST ROOM DAY 104 Later Sam sits alone in the breakfast room. The garden outside is deserted. He stares at the contract in front of him. The sale price is written clearly out in words and figures. He runs his finger over the words on the page, He can hear Ben and Naomi bickering in the kitchen, 105 INT KITCHEN DAY Naomi and Ben are both eating bags of chips. BEN I'm having the dining room table. NAOMI You've got nowhere to put it! BEN Neither have you! NAOMI As if you'll take care of it! BEN Fuck you! Sam enters. They glare at him. SAM I'm selling it. Ben scrunches up his chip bag and throws it at the bin in disgust. He misses. Sam goes and picks it up and puts it in the bin. He takes a kitchen towel and wipes up the chip crumbs. He puts the kitchen towel in the bin. BEN What will you do all day dad? Naomi glares at Ben. BEN When you haven't got this house to clean. SAM I don't like housework. I never did. Ben and Naomi sense a new independence in his tone. SAM Don't worry about me. I've got plans. Maomi and Ben glance at each other, mystified. Sam smiles.

BEN Are you going back to Japan? sm No, Not yet.

BEN What are you going to do with the money? sm 1'11 let you know,

NAOMJ: Most of it's actually mum's money.

SAM I won't give it all away. He smiles and leaves the room, Naomi and Ben exchange a look of alarm.

TNT LILY'S LIVING ROOM DAY Sam stares at the Buddhist shrine on the wall of Lily's cramped living room,

The television is on though no one is watching, Lily sits across from Sam clutching the cheque he has just given her.

SAnu(V.0. ) Lily wouldn" taka the money.

Lily hands the cheque back Lo Sam, shaking her head. Sam stares at the figure he has written on it, $200,000 S;rUclr(V*O. ) She told me to put it in the bank for Angela, She didn't want the husband to get his hands on it, Sam Looks at Lily. Ee smiles. She smiles and cries at the same time. sm I'm sorry. r wasn't thinking* Lily throws herself at Sam's feet weeping.

LILY (IN VIETNmSE) Thank you. Thank you, Sam goes to touch her hair but then thinks better of it. He lets her cry. Me folds the cheque and puts it in his pocket.

JNT MUSIC SHOP DAY 107 Rows of violins hang from the ceiling. Sam sits watching the SHOPKEEPER hand one of them to Angela, She handles it lovingly. SHOPKEEPER This is the best instrument I have. Angela looks up at Sam for permission to try it, SAM Go on, Angela takes up the vi.olin and starts to play. She is Lost to the world. The shopkeeper looks at Sam, They smile at each other. SAM(V.0. ) Lily had no illusions about music as a profession. She knew the competition would be fierce.

108 INT SCHOOL UNIFOW SHOP DAY 108 Rows of girls' school uniforms hang on the walls.

Sam sits waiting for Angela to emerge from the change rooms.

A VOLUNTEER MOTHER smiles at him.

MOTHER She just starting?

SAM

Yes I

MOTHER Have you just got the one here? Sam smiles and nods. mgela emerges from behind the change room curtains, completely decked out in her new school uniform, It is all a bit big for her. She looks somehow younger, more vulnerable, She watches for Sam's reaction, Sam beams at her.

sm(v,a.) Lily just wanted her to have the same chances as other girls,

MOTHER How does that feel3

She does a little turn to show herself off, 109 INT STAIRS DAY 109 Sam and Angela descend the stairs with all their parcels, A few GIRLS and their MOTHERS pass coming the other way. Angela reaches across and takes Sam by the hand. The feeling of her hand in his gives Sam an intense feeling of joy. Time seems to slow for a moment.

A packed auditorium. Rows and rows of eager PARENTS and STUDENTS watch as the SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA settles up on stage. Their CONDUCTOR takes her place at the front of the orchestra to applause from the audience. Sam is sitting halfway back searching for Angela. Be sees her up on stage sitting in the first violins. She spots him and gives a little wave. Sam waves back. The conductor calls for hush, There is a long pause. The music begins, Sam, listening for Angela and watching the look of intense concentration on her face, is lost to the world. 11 1 INT CAR NIGHT 111 Sam drives Angela home after the concert. ANGELA She told us we suck. SAM What's her name? ANGELA Mrs Babbage. We call her Mrs Baggage. She's a lesbian. Sam glances at Angela, shocked. ANGELA The school's full of them. She looks out the window. ANGELA Everyone thinks it's such a great school. They're a11 such bitches. Sam picks up a real sadness in her. ANGELA They reckon I'm a lesbian because I haven't got a boyfriend. Sam glances at her. ANGELA It's all they ever talk about. SAM Tell them I'm your boyfriend. Angela laughs. So does Sam, EXT LILY'S RESTAURANT NIGHT 112 Sam pulls up outside of Lily's restaurant. The front of the place has had a makeover. New neon lights flash Lily's name into the night. It is late, They get out of the car and go inside. INT RESTAUMT NIGHT 113 Lily sits at a table watching Sam and Angela eating their noodle soup. The restaurant has been repainted, white with a red wall at the back. There are posh new tables and chairs. A new carpet. Lily wears a beautiful Vietnamese traditional dress, Her hair is up, She looks younger, prettier. She wears more makeup than before. Angela finishes first and takes her bowl out to the kitchen. She comes back with a pot of tea and two teacups, She pours tea for her mother and for Sam. ANGELA Goodnight. I'm going to bed,

She glances at her mother, then at Sam. WGELA Thank you for coming.

Sam smiles at her, SAM I love to hear you play. Angela leaves the room. Sam watches her disappear out the back, Lily sips her tea, Sam finishes his soup and takes out his wallet to pay. SAM Thanks. Lily reaches across and stops him. LILY You don't pay.

Sam tries to take out some money. Lily grabs hold of his hand. She is looking right into his eyes,

LILY I pay you. Sam stares at her, afraid of her sudden intensity.

SAPll No Lily. Lily takes his hand and tries to kiss it. He struggles to get free of her. She pleads with him, LILY Why you don't want me? Sam panics, He pulls his hand away from hers, throws twenty dollars on the table and flees. His chair crashes to the floor.

114 EXT LILY'S RES NIGWT 114 Sam runs to his car and gees in,

115 INT CAR NIGHT 115 Sam looks back through the restaurant window, Lily is still sitting at the table. She stares out at him. He starts the car and pulls away. Be glances in the window as he pasees. Lily is clearing up the table. She glances up at him as he drives off* She is crying.

116 INT UNIT BEDROOM NIGHT 116

Smlies asleep in his bed, His new unit overlooks the beach, twenty flasrs below, Sam sleeps with the window open. The surf makes a constant roar even this far up. Sam is restless. He writhes in his sleep.

Be is having a nightmare.

117 INT LILY'S KTTCMEN DM 117

In SM'S DREfiM Lily is standing at the kitchen stove stirring a big vat of soup stack. She looks up at Sam and beckons him to come closer. She smiles and offers him a taste of the soup. Sam comes gradually closer, He peers into the vat of boiling stock, These in the cloudy steming liquid he seas Julie's face, grey in death, bobbing up and dawn, leering at him,

bliLy gives a demonic laugh, She offers a ladleful of soup to Sam, He tries to flee, She grabs hold of his hand and wan't let 90 118 INT BEDROOM MIGHT 118

Sam wakes up in a sweat. He sits bolt upright in bed, covering his face with his hands, trying to breathe. lag INT LILY'S ~STAU DAY 119 Sam sits in Lily's restaurant eating his soup. It tastes bitter.

He pushes it aside,

SAM(V.0. ) I couldn't pretend things were the same after that, They weren't,

Lily is in the kitchen stirring the vat of soup stock. She glances up at Sam as he puts some money down on the table and Leaves. Lily comes to clear the table. She sees that Sam has left his soup txneaten,

120 EXT mGELA'S SCHOOL DAY 120 Sam's car is parked outside the gates of Angela's school in a long row of Range Rovers and BWs. Sam is leaning against the side of the car waiting for Angela to emerge, GIRLS flow out of the gates in a river. Sam searches for Angela amongst them. She spots him first and runs towards him, pleased to see him, She is carrying her violin. SAM Afternoon tea? ANGELA I've got my lesson. SAM I'll give you a lift. They get into the car and dri-ve off. 121 SNT CAR DAY They drive in silence for a while, 1SNGEI;A Where have you been?

ANGELA Why haven't we seen you? Sam hesitates, searching for the words, SRM Your mother finds me hard going. Angela stares out the window. SAM (COMT'D) She's got enough problems,

ANGELA Why don't you marry her? Sam looks at her, He turns into the street where Angela's violin teacher lives. Me pulls up outside the teacher's house. Be stops the engine and looks at Angela* She has never looked more beautiful.

SAM Because 1 don't love her. Angela gazes at him, knawing what ia coming next. sm 1 love you. Whether Sam is joking Qr not, this is exactly what Angela likes to hear, She gives him a triumphant smile. She leans across and gives Sam a kiss on the cheek, Xt is a sensation Sam Lives for. As if in a dream he watches Angela get out of the car and go into the teacher's house, He starts the car and drives away. 122 INT UNIT LIVING ROOM NIGHT 122 Late at night Sam is sitting in his living room watching satellite television, The nostalgic Japanese singing show is on, The song, as usual, is about lost love. 123 EXT STREET NIGHT 123 Two fire engines scream through the middle of Surfers Paradise with their sirens wailing. 124 EXT LILY'S RESTAURANT NIGHT 124 Lily's restaurant goes up in flames. Two fire engines try desperately to hose it down. Another two arrive and the FIREMEN expertly go through the drill, but it is too late. The place is doomed. Lily and Angela sta.nd watching, a POLICEWOMAN by their side. 125 EXT LILY'S RESTAURANT MORNING 125 The smoking ruin of Lily's restaurant is cordoned off with tape. It reads CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER Sam stands to one side as a couple of POLICEMEN enter. Sam stares into 'the ashes, Standing next to him is the PAWNBROKER from next door. He looks like he's been up all night. PAWNBROKER They was bloody lucky no one was killed. He lights a cigarette, flicking the match into a puddle. Sam watches it float there in a petrol. slick. PAWNBROKER Took half an hour. Less, Had a bit of help I reckon. The pawnbroker draws on his cigarette and coughs. PAWNBROKER Bloody near took my place with it. Sam surveys his dingy shop next door. PAWBROKER Pity it didn't. Sam walks away through a small crowd of ONLOOKERS. He is in shock. He pushes through the crowd as though through thick mud, He glimpses the faces in the crowd. They seem to be leering at him. They frighten him. He hurries,

SAM(V.0. ) Of course I went looking for them. 126 INT UNIT KITCHEN DAY 126 Sam goes through the phone book.. There are pages full of Tranhs.

SAM(V*O.) They'd moved in with the son's fiance's family. But I didn't know where. 127 EXT PLATS DAY 127 Sam pulls up outside a dingy block of flats. Re gets out of the car and goes to the staimell. 128 EXT LILY'S SISTER'S FLAT DAY 128 He knocks on the door of the flat hard. There is no answer. He knocks again. The door to the next flat opens. A TONGAN WOMAN pokes her head out. Her little BOY clings to her legs. TONGAN Who you looking for? SAM Lily Tranh. Her sister lives here. T0NC;AW Who are you? sm A friend of Lily's, TOMGRN You that Japanese? Sam says nothing. TONGPlEJ Geez you make a lot of trouble. That husband been coming round here looking for Lily. Shouting about this and that. Saying if he don't get the money he going to kill her. That's why the police been round here.

SAM When? TONGAN Yesterday. Lily so scared of that man. sm Where are they? TONGAM They gone to Jenny's place, Somewhere in Carindale. J don't know exactly. The boy starts whining. 1.29 EXT FLATS DAY Sam comes back down the stairwell,

SAM(V*O.) She said the palice would know the address and phone nuwer. She suggested S get in touch with them if I wanted to talk to Lily, 130 EXT FLATS DAY 130

Sam gets in his car and drives away. 131 INT CAR DAY 131 Sam drives to the beach and parks the car. He sits watching the ocean.

SAM(V.0. ) But I decided to stay away from the police. I didn't want them asking me questions about Angela's money. 132 EXT BEACH WAT.IWAY DAY 132 Sam walks along the beach walkway. FWILIES picnic on the grass as usual, He sees them in a kind of daze,

Srn(V.0, ) They had nothing to connect it with the note. But I didn't want to take any chances.

Sam catches the eye of a MAN sitting on the grass on his own. Panicked, Sam looks away. He turns on his heel and heads back in the direction he cam. In fact the man is not looking at Sam at all but at a kite flying in the sky above him. 133 IMT POLICE STATION NIGHT 133 EJoble sits at his desk working late. He has a file on Julie's suicide open in front of him. He stares at the blacksnail note in its plastic cover. There is something about it he doesn't Like. 134 INT UNXT DINING ROOM DAY 134 Sam sits at the big dining room table writing a letter. Doors open onto his twentieth floor balcony, A stiff sea breeze worries at the page as he writes, We see he is writing in Japanese. Sarvr(V.0. ) I regret sending that note to Julie more than anything I've ever done in my life, It was a very unfeeling thing to do. The letter...

1 should have just told your mother how unhappy X was, She would have understood, She was unhappy herself.

I don't know how we got that way, When we first came here we were full 05: hopes and dreams for the future. We were so sure we 'd done the right thing bringing you here. It w~sthe kind of family life I'd always dreamed of having.

I hope that when you read this you will understand why it is necessary far me to leave you, P don't expect you will ever fox-give me for what I .have done. I acted for reasons I don't fully understand myself* I will always love you. Your father. Sam stares at the letter for a moment, then writes a Postscript.

Be folds the letter carefully and places it in an envelope.

235 INT UNIT BEDROOM DAY 135 Sam is asleep on his bed in his Japanese underwear. He has a half smile on his face.

136 EXT BEACII BAY %n SAM" DREW he is an the beach watching his S playing in the sand. They look up at him, laughing with pure joy. Sam gets up and walks away to the water's edge. Me turns and takes a last look at his fmily before a wave crashes into him, knocking him off his feet. Sam is plunged into deep, swirling water. It is too murky to see very far, Afraid for his life Sam struggles against the current but it pulls him down relentlessly. Suddenly there is a band on his ankle, gripping him hard. He looks down and sees Ainslie's bloodless face smirking up at him from the depths. 137 INT UNIT BEDROOM DAY 137 Sam wakes up with a cry. He takes a moment to corn to. He glances at the clock radio beside the bed, He sits up, He sits for a moment on the side of the bed with his head in his hands, 138 1HT BATHROOM DAY 138 Sam comes into the bathroom and washes his face at the basin, He stares at himself in the mirror. SAM (IN JAPmESE) It's over, 139 INT UNIT LLVINC ROOM DAY 139 Sam, dressed now, goes over to the antique Japanese box he used to keep his gun in. Be slowly opens a secret door on the box and takes out, not a gun, but a Japanese passport and a JAL airline ticket. He slips them into a jacket draped over his suitcase, He goes to the dining room table in the next room, picks up the letter to his children, comes back and props it up against a framed photograph of the children when they were little, the same photograph he kept by his bed in the Wombat Crescent house, He picks up the jacket and takes the suitcase by its trolley handle. He glances around the apartment then turns to leave, dragging his suitcase behind himo The front door to the unit opens then closes with a thud, the sound echoing through the empty rooms.

140 INT AIRPORT DEPmTUW LOUNGE DAY 140

Sam queues up at the JdY; Business Class counter to check in. Most of the other PASSENGERS are Japanese. We glances araund at them, as if realising for the first time that they all look just like him.

141 INT AIRPORT DEPARTlURE LOUNGE DAY 141

Sam,wanders around the souvenir shops in the airport. We finds himself in the soft toy section of one of them. Me picks up a Koala and looks at it. It has a tag around its neck reading G'DAY MATE.

He puts it back.

142 IEJT PLANE DAY 142

Sam settles into his business class seat. A STEWABDESS, imaculate as they all are, comes towards hime He smiles. She smiles.

STEWARDESS (IN JmmESE) Have you had a good holiday? Sam hesitates before answering. sm Yes thank you, She is called away. Sam leans back and closes his eyes,

SAM(V.0, ) Pa$, Don't worry about me, E am very happy (MORE) SAM(V.0.) (cont'd) There is no better feeling than when you are at the end of an old life and at the beginning of a new one, and both of them seem like a dream, 143 EXT BALCONY MORNING 143 The view from the balcony of Sam's bedroom, looking down the Nerang River on a perfect morning. The river gleams in the morning sun. 144 INT PLANE DAY Sam apens his eyes with a start, Noble is bending over him smiling, Burnett is standing beside him. Sam looks from one to the other and knows he is doomed. NOBLE I'm.afraid I've got some bad news.

145 INT POLICE STATION INTERVIEW ROOM DAY 1.45 Sam sits opposite Noble. On the table between them is an open file, Burnett stands by the wall looking dangerous, his arms folded across his chest. Noble takes out Sam's letter to his children and spreads it out on the table, Sam glances nervously from the letter to Noble and back again. NOBLE I'm assuming you wrote this? SAM Yes. Noble looks at the envelope and reads what is written on the front in Japanese. NQBLE (IN JAPANESE) To Ben and Naomi. He looks up at Sam, whose face seems drained of all. colour. NOBLE Your two children? Sam nods. Noble takes out a sheet of yellow lined paper on which he has laboured to produce a rough translation of Sam's letter in his own writing. NOBLE My Japanese is a bit rusty but I think I got the main points. Sam stares at the yellow page. NOBLE It's a good read. Sam looks up at him. NOBLE I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. 146 INT COURTROOM DAY 146 Naomi and Ben are in the courtroom to hear their father's sentence pronounced. Sam stands beside his DEFENCE LAWYER. The JUDGE looks down on him, JUDGE I sentence you to five years imprisonment... Naorni starts screaming from the back of the room. NAOMI It's not enough! Shame on you! He killed her! Ben joins in. BEN He killed our mother! Sam hangs his head in shame,

147 EXT PRXSON YARD DAY 147 Sam sits in the shade at a table. He is wearing his prison garb, Jn front of him is a small wooden box, He watches PRISONERS taking their exercise. In this minimum security facility the atmosphere is almost that of a picnic, Prisoners sit on the grass in one and twos, Others walk and chat. Xt is a beautiful day.

A hand lands on Sam's shouldar giving him a start,

He looks up at Keith, standing beside him, grinning. sm Don't do that. You give me heart attack. KEITH You will giwe me a heart attack* sI1N You will giwe me a heart attack, Sam takes a small notebook and a pancil from his pocket and makes a note.

KEITH How come you write better than you talk, SAM Ja.panese education. We studied the textbook, Jt would be preferable to arrange the meeting on Friday, rather than on Monday as previously i.ndicated.

Keith takes a seat opposite Sm, We reaches for the box and starts to unpack it. It is a Go set, a kind of Japanese chess,

They set it up for a game. S~(V~0.) Keith and I have found that we have a lot in common, Apart from Julie. They stare at the board with intense concentration. Sam makes a move. 148 EXT GmDEN DAY 148 Sam and Keith work side by side in the vegetable garden. They have towels wrapped around their heads, Japanese style, They could be two old farmers, Their enthusiasm for the work is almost professional,

Srn(V.0, ) We've discovered we're both country boys.

149 INT TELEVISION LOUNGE DAY 149 A few PRISONERS sit around watching the cricket, Sam stares through the window at the rain outside, He looks at Keith who is engrossed in the match.

SraM(V.0, ) The only thing I really don't understand is his contentment, He'd be happy to stay here for the rest of his life, 150 INT PRISON DINING ROOM NIGHT 150 Sam and Keith sit next to each other at dinner. Keith eats heartily. Sam pushes bits of grey food around on his plate.

SAPII(V.0. ) Be's better off in here, he says, than he was an the outside, 151 ENT PRSSON CORRIDOR NIGHT They walk together back to their cells.

SAM(V,O. ) When I ask him why he laughs, Keith laughs. Re turns to Sam. KEITH Nothing left to lose, Sam smiles, They are at his door. Keith gives him a wave and continues on towards his cell further down the corridor, There is a spring in his step.

Srn(V.0, ) He thinks he'd make a good monk. Buddhist he says. Sam goes into his cell and shuts the door,

SwM(V.O* ) Re's given up on the others. Keith goes into his cell and shuts the door, IMT KEITH'S CELL Keith sits in the Lotus position on the floor of his cell, eyes closed, deep in meditation. Books on religion and meditation line his bookshelf,

INT SAM'S CELL NIGHT 152 Sam sits at his desk writing a letter. A dozen photographs of Angela are stuck to the wall in front of him, In most she is holding her violin. In some she is beside her mother.

On his bookshelf are arranged his dictionaries and a few histories of Australia,

SW(V.Q, ) Please don't worry about me, I am very well, I have been reading about Australia's beginnings. We were once a nation of prisoners as you know from school., And most of them turned out all right in the end. Which gives me a real sense of hope, The lights go out. Sam is plunged into blackness, A crack of light from the corridor outside falls on Angela's face. It is the only thing Sam can see.

SPbm(V.0, ) Even in my darkest hours. Thank you for writing to an old man. Your letters are the highlight of my week. When I get out of here I am going back to Japan. Perhaps you will visit me there one day, when you are famous. I would enjoy that very much. He can hear Angela playing.

4. JM and Hiro: The Japanese as Tourist

Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967 (2000) is a far more sophisticated and ambitious work than either Changi or Heaven’s Burning. Law and her partner Eddie Fong, who co-wrote the film, have consistently made films both in Australia and in Hong Kong that challenge conventions of form and genre, that resist traditional expectations of film as commercially driven entertainment, and that explore complex questions of Asian identities against a background of transnational migrations (Mitchell, 2003, p. 139). In films like Farewell China (1990),

Autumn Moon (1992) and Floating Life (1996) Law sets out to destabilise the particular ethnic determinants of character I have observed to be the foundation of narratives like Changi and Heaven’s Burning. This in itself might be considered progressive, if this work had not resulted in a new rigidity, a new dictate of style, evidenced in The Goddess of 1967, which positions the Japanese as the exemplars of postmodern angst about place and connection. This new image of the Japanese as

‘modern nomads’ (Mitchell, 2003, p.143), complete with inexpressive demeanour and designer luggage, is arguably only another version of the simplification of character necessary to stereotypical

representations of race. In this version, savagery is replaced by cool, the daemonic by a distinctly placid ennui. But despite the new aesthetic, fixity remains a condition of ‘otherness’, and appearance is reiterated as the primal determinant of character. Stereotypes, as

Donald Kirihara reminds us (1996, p. 82), are not stable, ahistorical absolutes. ‘Not only,’ he states, ‘will each period define its own stereotypes, but it will offer tactics for their unveiling’, so that just as postmodernism now supplies Clara Law with the aesthetic by which she attempts to define ‘Japaneseness’, so too does it expose the tendency for that aesthetic to comply with orientalist presumptions about the Japanese.

While it remains outside the scope of this study to inquire too extensively into postmodernism’s complex influence on contemporary screen narrative, it is important to understand how, specifically, this influence works in a film like The Goddess of 1967. The film reveals the presence of emerging paradigms of ethnicity as style and tourism as perpetual escape. These have the potential to constrain Japanese screen characters within a limited range of expression as effectively as older clichés about the Japanese have in the previous works discussed. This is not to say that the The Goddess of 1967 is uninteresting or unworthy

as an experiment in narrative form and content; only that new forms

have the potential to create new pitfalls. The following discussion is an

attempt to indicate, in relation to the ‘telling’ of the Japanese in

Australian screen stories, where these pitfalls might lie.

The Goddess of 1967 tells the story of JM (Rikiya Kurokawa) and BG

(Rose Byrne), a pair of unlikely lovers who traverse the landscape in a

Citroen car, a ’67 Goddess, in search of BG’s dark past. JM appears to us first in his native Japan, a blue, unpeopled world, which he inhabits as if in a dream, his headset playing an eclectic mix of iconic western tunes. His companions in this strangely empty (for Tokyo) world are his exotic reptilian pets and a girlfriend who seems to prefer their company to his. In an internet chat room JM finds the car of his dreams, a 1967 Citroen, and departs for Australia to buy it, leaving his girlfriend to care for the snakes.

Having landed somewhere, deliberately unnamed, in Australia, he fronts up at a modest suburban house wheeling his silver suitcase, his foreignness conspicuous, despite, or perhaps because of, the incongruous bushman’s hat he has acquired to shade his green hair.

BG greets him at the front door and lets him into the house. Inside its dark rooms he discovers firstly that BG is blind, and secondly that a shooting has taken place, recently enough for the victim’s blood and brains to be still stuck to the walls and ceiling. Unfazed by the traumatic events his imminent arrival on the scene has somehow

helped to bring about, JM asks to see the car. BG takes him to the garage where the pink and voluptuous Goddess awaits, the beautifully preserved object of his desire. He touches her, then enters her like a lover. At the sound of the Goddess’s sweet engine he weeps, overcome with a passion akin to but not the same as, sexual surrender. A truly postmodern child, he is consumed not by ‘real’ desire, but by a private fantasy of reinventing himself as his hero Alain Delon. ‘We are the same,’ he says later in the film, as if stating his wish to be the French star were enough in this world of surfaces he inhabits, to make it true.

BG abandons her cousin’s now orphaned four year old and sets out with JM to drive the Goddess to its rightful owner. ‘Don’t trust anyone’, she tells the child, sending her back into the house to contemplate her fate alone. Remarkably, the child, in the deeply dysfunctional world the film sets up, shows no emotion at being left, despite having so recently and violently lost her parents. It is as if BG had successfully passed on to the girl, by her final words of advice, the same cold-bloodedness that has ensured her own survival thus far.

JM’s lack of interest in the fate of the child would suggest that the blue reptilian world he has come from, Japan, is as dysfunctional and cold- blooded as this one, half a world away in the suburban sun. In the absence of any definitive responses from JM that might indicate the contrary, we are left to assume that human suffering is powerless to

move him, that his emotions are aroused by cars alone, specifically by

Goddesses, and that to possess a Goddess is the sum of his desire. The journey the unprotesting JM then embarks upon with this blind, bulimic, charmless woman is primarily hers, but he gets to drive.

‘Where are we going?’ he finally thinks to ask. ‘It’s not on the map,’ BG answers in typically loaded fashion, thoroughly in charge despite her handicap. She might be in the passenger seat but it is JM who is along for the ride. Like an exotic child, or a seeing eye dog, he attends BG’s journey/performance but is not central to it. He is by turns as petulant as a child, and as patient as a dog, but like a child or a dog he is inarticulate about his own wishes and unable to properly communicate his needs. Restricted to poor English he limits his utterances to simple questions, and plain answers, none of which reveal any depth of feeling, or any thought from which might be inferred a specific history.

He is, in this sense reminiscent of Keanu Reeves’s Neo in The Matrix

(Feng, 2002, p.149), unreadable, and therefore infinitely available for the purposes of others. Reeves, who has a Hawaiian Chinese father and an English mother, has been described as ‘the uber-cyber-movie hero’, with a charisma, according to Feng (ibid.), that ‘emerges precisely from his lack of presence’. The Matrix brilliantly utilises its reticent hero, creating a purpose for him that is nothing less than messianic. By contrast, JM’s reticence is simply a withdrawal from all sense of

purpose, which is consistent with Law’s mistrust of conventional

narrative.

Clara Law rejects the kind of conventional screen narrative (Millard,

2001, n.p.), which produces stories in which ‘you can explain

everything’. Her aesthetic purpose has always been served by what

Villella (2003, n.p.) calls ‘mosaic storytelling, weaving together

disparate narratives from other times and places… an inclination that

fits her disdain towards cause and effect narrative and shows the relation between things in lateral, less literal ways’. BG’s ‘heart of darkness’ (Teo, 2003, n.p.) journey is accordingly told in a series of random flashbacks to both recent and primal scenes of abuse, by means of which it is hoped we will come to understand her journey’s purpose, which is to kill her father. The car is her means of finding him, just it was her mother’s means of escape from him and her grandmother’s before that. But Law’s mosaic pieces of narrative are not confined to elements of story alone. Interspersed throughout the film are shots of the Goddess itself, its design drawings, pieces of written text describing its virtues, narrated or written historical facts pertaining to it. This is a technique that recalls the ‘pillow shots’ of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (Mitchell, 2003, p.147), a filmmaker whose work

Law admires (ibid.), typically shots of ordinary streets, or office buildings, or empty hallways. The purpose of this paratext in Law’s

film is unclear, although it has the effect of decentering the narrative away from the events of the journey. This is not the same purpose

Ozu’s ‘pillow shots’ serve so exquisitely, which is, according to

Chinese American director Wayne Wang, to embrace the environment as a character in his films, and to suggest the passing of time (Mitchell,

2003. p.147). Law’s shots instead draw attention only to themselves, and to a consumption aesthetic she presumably wishes us to read into

JM’s desire for the car. The shots ‘sell’ the car as does the accompanying spoken text, on the basis of its peculiarly French desirablility. Nevertheless, the allure of the Goddess, to which these randomly placed texts refer, is ultimately a mysterious one, as is JM’s strange desire to have one. In fact, both the allure and the desire are made exotic and unknowable, like JM himself, about whom we learn less in the film than we do about the Goddess. This ‘lateral’ as opposed to ‘literal’ connection between the French car and the Japanese man makes both complicit in the orientalist requirement that the foreigner

(and the foreign product), be aestheticised for the purposes of consumption. It is significant that Law chose to cast a Prada fashion model in the role of JM. She has his character tell us very early in the piece, as if it is important, that he uses Armani scent, and that living in

Tokyo is like living in a Mars Bar. He is a man, in other words, who defines himself by the brands he identifies with, the ultimate brand

being ‘Japanese’. Twice in the film he says ‘I am a Japanese man’, not

so much with pride, as for the sake of clarity. I am not just any man, I am a man made in Japan.

The same compulsion to aestheticise for consumption is seen in the way Law portrays the landscape through which BG and JM travel on their journey, not so much together, as coincidentally. It is a landscape of extremes where nothing ordinary seems ever to have happened, peopled by misfits to whom normal social constraints do not apply.

Clara Law has said that she ‘doesn’t believe in normality’ (Millard,

2003, n.p.). These people,’ she says, ‘are in a lot of pain. That’s what makes them erratic’. She is speaking here of the film’s main characters, but the same could equally be said of all the characters Law’s ‘outback’ throws up. There is ‘drummer boy’, the tent boxer who tries to rape

BG. There is BG’s mother, so obsessed with sin and damnation she burns herself to death, and, ultimately, there is BG’s father who believes nothing can or should stop him from having sex with his daughters. This kind of extreme pain then is endemic to this imagined landscape, though not normal, because nothing here can be.

‘Orientalism,’ according to Sumiko Higashi’s reading of Edward Said,

‘requires the theatricalisation of foreign peoples for Western consumption’ (1996, p. 329). For Law, a migrant to Australia from

Hong Kong via the National Film School in London, it may be that all peoples require theatricalisation, because, even within her native Hong

Kong, everyone is a foreigner and, moreover, that all landscapes are imbued with the same quality of discomforting ambivalence as is Hong

Kong’s ‘cultural space’ (Mitchell, 2003, p. 142).

This attraction to the bizarre and dysfunctional is not new in

Australian cinema, nor is it novel as an element in the Australian imaginary of Asia and Asians. Gabrielle Finnane has pointed to a propensity for Australian film narratives set in Asia to use ‘orphan’ tales

… in which people who do not belong to their family, or community,

either through psychological alienation, actual orphan status, or social

ostracism through difference, encounter an alien community from

which they are doubly estranged. (1997, p.54)

This is indeed the premise of The Goddess of 1967, despite the film’s

local setting. The encounter between BG and JM could not have taken

place had not both been defined at the outset as marginal to their

respective communities and alienated from ‘normality’. Midori and

Colin only get together in Heaven’s Burning because she is estranged from her overbearing culture and he is on the run from the law. Under more usual circumstances the problem of racial difference would presumably have been too difficult for them to surmount, so their encounter, like that between BG and JM is considered to be in need of

heightened drama if it is to occur at all. As Meaghan Morris has observed (1998, p.246), in Australian film narratives

white contact with Asianness is always sublime (heightened and

extraordinary)…there is no room for ordinary, for banal, friendly,

unsensational contact, everyday mixed experiences, and…death

represents the ultimate sublimity.

Finnane has further observed (1997, p.64) what she describes as ‘a

filmmaking tic’, a compulsion in Australian films dealing with

Asianness and Asia to add ‘a bit of perversity’, to lean towards

‘whatever is twisted, savage, grotesque, mummified, satanic or

parodic’. These ‘Gothic twists’, of which BG’s tale is one extended

example, indicate, according to Finnane (1997, p.63), a definite

discomfort with difference and its attendant complexities. ‘The incest

scenario is one of a number of motifs of perversity, ‘says Finnane,

‘which transform stories of cross-cultural interaction into a mirror of

local concerns…’ (ibid.). In Romper Stomper (Dir. Geoffrey Wright,

1992), a film which Finnane has discussed at length, the racial violence between the skinheads and their Vietnamese enemies is somehow naturalised by the skinheads’ revulsion at uncovering the story of a father’s incest, adding a ‘psychodramatic frisson to what would

otherwise be a story of urban tribal warfare’ (ibid.).

In a similar way BG’s story of incest swamps and displaces JM’s story

by taking up all the dramatic oxygen in the film. He is allocated one

flashback towards the end of The Goddess of 1967 in which he sees his

friend killed in a road accident. ‘I have a story to tell,’ he says to BG at

the end of the film, ‘a very long story’, which makes us wonder why he

has been prevented from telling it to her before now. Again Finnane’s

observations (1997, p. 66) of Australian films set in Asia provide a clue

to this reticence. In films like Bangkok Hilton ( Dir. Ken Cameron, 1989),

Echoes of Paradise (Dir. Phillip Noyce, 1988) and Turtle Beach (Dir.

Stephen Wallace, 1992)

…the recurrent emotion is a sentimental pathos, based on the

assumption of the nobility of feeling something, but not being able to

express it directly, a kind of wanting-to-feel-something emotion.

(McFarlane and Mayer, 1992, p. 239)

A liking for ‘recessive characters, subdued or virtually non-existent

climaxes, and tentative closures’ (ibid.) is arguably a flaw common to

other Australian films, a generic weakness in the national filmmaking

culture that some would argue causes much of the local product to

‘slide into an aesthetic “hole” ‘ between art house and mainstream

narrative paradigms without developing a mastery of ‘the conventions

of either melodrama or any other dramatic form’ (ibid.). Certainly JM’s

total silence about his personal history in The Goddess of 1967 makes it

clear that ‘character’ is not in fact what he is in the film to demonstrate.

He is there, like the male model he is in ‘real’ life, to be seen and not heard.

So what does JM look like? And why? In an interview with Michel

Honegger (2001, p.12) shortly after the release of The Goddess of 1967,

Law said that for her ‘…it is Tokyo that evokes most poignantly a

constant sense of loss, where the old is always being reinvented,’ and

that characters like JM represent for her ‘the quintessential postmodern

man’. This elevation of Japan and the Japanese to the status of symbol

for a complex discourse and sensibility is problematic, primarily

because, as we have seen in the case of JM, it denies individual

Japanese the possession of a specific history. Kojin Karatani (2000, p. 140) has coined the term ‘aestheticentrism’ to describe the process

whereby, typically Western and more specifically French intellectuals,

have formed the habit of ‘bracketing…the concerns of pedestrian

Japanese, who live their real lives, and struggle with intellectual and ethical problems inherent in modernity’, while insisting on their passionate love of Japanese culture. Inherent in ‘aestheticentrism’ is the confusion between respect for the aesthetics or the culture of the other, with respect for the other as an individual. At its worst this confusion can cause what Karatani (ibid.) calls ‘an uneradicable self- deceit’ in those who believe both that people of the non-West are

inferior, but that their cultures are not. ‘Looking down on the other as an object of scientific analysis,’ says Karatani (ibid.), ‘and looking up to

the other as an aesthetic idol are less contradictory than complicit’. The

aesthetic worship masks the sense of superiority, and both disguise a

basic lack of interest in the ordinary lives of the people in question. For

Law, JM is Japan, and Japan is less a real place than a site of post-

modern eclecticism, an aesthetic jumble assembled from brand goods

and French movies, antique cars and reptiles. She is less interested in

‘telling’ JM, than in presenting him as an aesthetic object in himself, of

less consequence as a person than as a consumer. This unwillingness to

look further than the surface of ‘Japaneseness’ recalls Roland Barthes’s

suggestion that in certain aspects Japanese culture offers the outsider ‘a

‘breach of meaning’ (1982, p.69) and an ‘exemption from

meaning’(1982, p.73) which absolve us from the task of interpretation’,

but which might be, according to Mitchell (2000, p.193), just a way of

cocooning oneself from the complexity of ‘an alien world’.

In Law’s case it might be less an attempt to cocoon us from the reality

of Japan, than to adopt Japaneseness as a marker of ‘cool’. In his

fascinating analysis of the popularity of Japanese anime among young

male university students in Australia, Craig Norris argues that

within the Australian anime fans’ rhetoric of Japan, there is

[an]…effort to control and absorb Japan (the other) while still

remaining essentially Australian in terms of Japan’s relevance and

meaning. That is, the anime fan is using Japan, not in any real sense of

its lived diversity, contradictions and internal repressions, but in

terms of an entity of otherness, an unambiguous marker of non-

Australian mainstream popular culture. (2000, p.225)

‘A style of difference’ is the term Norris coins (ibid.) to describe the aesthetic these fans find so appealing in Japanese animation. No real difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ need be addressed if ‘style’ is all that is at stake, for no real individuals exist in the ‘exotic techno-

Orientalist’ world of anime (Norris, 2000, p. 231), only unreal cyborg characters to serve as fantasies of difference; girls who look like boys,

Japanese who look like foreigners, machines that look human. That these characters represent a self-Orientalising fantasy of Japanese technological dominance for their creators attests to the power of

Orientalism to infiltrate non-Western as well as Western constructions of ‘The East’. According to what Iwabuchi calls ‘complicit exoticism’

(1994, p.49), the maintenance of a notion of Japan as a unified entity is useful for the Japanese themselves. ‘What is important in maintaining this image of Japan,’ Norris adds, ‘is not the relation these images have to the lived reality within Japan but how they are used to define itself

… with respect to the other’ (Norris, 2000, p.231). ‘Japan,’ according to

Shuhei Hosokawa (1999, p.20), ‘though exoticised by the West, shares the exotic gaze of its Western cultural model’. Something like this

shared gaze informs Clara Law’s exoticized representation of not only

JM and Japan, but of Australia’s interior, a world she makes darkly and

uniformly Gothic rather than confront it in its true complexity. In this

way fear of difference is turned to style of difference, the fluidity of real

differences between individuals into fixed exchanges of exotica. In the

words of Frank Chickens (quoted in Mitchell, 2000, p. 193), a 90’s

Japanese karaoke style pop-duo,

Oh we like being yellow nips,

Because you think we are so hip.

But if you think we are so wise

Why don’t you look us in the eyes?

BG can’t look JM in the eyes for the simple reason that she is blind, so

she smells him and licks him instead, then makes love to him as he lies

like a dead weight beneath her. When he finally warms up he takes his

turn on top and they reach orgasm together. Sex overcomes death in

The Goddess of 1967 as ‘the ultimate sublimity’, the barrier of racial

difference between the two lovers being extinguished by Law’s version

of ‘Hollywood’s secular religion of heterosexual romance’ (Marchetti,

1993, p. 76). Although Hollywood has long acknowledged that

interracial sex can take place it has in the past insisted that one or both

of the transgressive lovers meet a tragic death (Marchetti, 1993, p.68). It

is only a recent tendency for Hollywood films ‘to use the spectacle of

interracial sexuality as part of a postmodern pastiche of contemporary

culture’ (Marchetti, 1993, p.9). Gina Marchetti sees this as a symptom

(1993, p. 208), not of a shift in Hollywood’s basic racial ideology, but of

a loss of faith in ‘the notion of the centred subject’. Postmodernism,

says Marchetti

acts as spectacle – outside the discursive functions of narrative.

Beyond the realist notion that film can accurately depict the

material world as well as the modernist concept of art as

intervention, postmodernism accepts the image as a

fabrication, as part of a commodity culture where no depth

exists beyond the surface of the marketplace. (1993, p.208)

Under the postmodernist regime interracial lovers need not die, for

somehow they do not truly exist in the first place. Nor does their love

any longer represent a transgression so much as a toying with the

exotic within the safety of the superficial. According to Marchetti, it is

critical thinking that dies as a result of the triumph of postmodernism

as a cinematic aesthetic (1993, p. 203), for this aesthetic ‘allows the

viewer to accept the most outrageous stereotype and the most complex

characterisation on the same level, as equally valid’ (1993, p. 204).

Perhaps this is the real, though unintentional, significance of the final

scene in The Goddess of 1967. BG and JM sit in the Goddess as before,

BG having just realised the futility of shooting her mad father. JM takes

BG’s hand and covers his eyes with it. He tells BG to warn him before they crash into something. ‘I’m as blind as you are,’ she says, laughing.

A blind JM drives down the road, as if seeing and not seeing were the same thing, and all destinations equally valid.

The producer of the film Peter Sainsbury admits (Sainsbury, 2004, p.

45) that The Goddess of 1967 failed as drama because the journey it described was not a life changing, dramatic one. Drama, he says ‘can only come from a deep grasp of the inner world of character, and always requires that there be something at stake for that character that an audience finds irresistible’. But this in turn requires that characters possess an inner world in the first place, and are not mere tourists in a postmodern theme park of self, shopping for external signs of identity, but untroubled by the actual need of one. The lack of an inner world tends to reduce character to stereotype, and to restrict dramatic expression to the clichéd and conventional. This is not to say that stereotypes are not sometimes useful as a means of ordering everyday complexity; only that they reduce the life-changing potential of drama whenever they are relied upon in place of characters with complex interior lives.

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Japanese Story, according to Sainsbury (ibid.), is another case of failed drama. Although the film received numerous AFI awards in the year of its release 2003, the screenplay, Sainsbury suggests, lacked ‘the transformative dynamic in narrative fiction’, more simply called

‘drama’. Why it was missing, he argues (ibid.), has to do with an aversion to risk on the part of the writers. If Sainsbury is correct, and I think he is, this begs an examination of what, exactly, the writers of

Japanese Story might have imagined was dangerous in their chosen material, and from what specific possibilities within that material they recoiled.

Japanese Story presents itself as a cross-cultural love story. A Japanese businessman, Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima), and an Australian geologist,

Sandy (Toni Collette), take a journey across a spectacular desert landscape and by way of various misadventures, fall in love. Sandy discovers Hiro is married. Hiro dies diving into a swimming hole.

Sandy returns his body to his wife. The wife returns to Japan with her dead husband and Sandy is left alone with her grief. Sainsbury is right to suggest that Hiro’s accidental death half way through the film radically reduces the story’s dramatic potential. Chance truncates the story’s central relationship, precluding the possibility that the lovers will transform each other further. From that moment onwards the film

is no longer about cross-cultural love. It becomes an essay on death

and grief, a chance for Toni Collette to show off her undeniable talent.

‘So many…[Australian] films,’ says Khoo (2004, n.p.), ‘seem unable to

offer any workable vision for the future of Asian/Australian relations,

besides a (metaphoric) death that eliminates the figure of difference’.

Japanese Story is one such film. Hiro, we have to assume, has either

served his purpose by the film’s halfway mark, or has become a threat

by then to the conventional limitations on the role of Asians in

narratives of Australia. In either case, Hiro’s drowning is a

disappointment, particularly for anyone anxious to see the

representation of Asians in Australian films progress beyond the

conventional requirement that they die for the betterment of whiteness.

We meet Hiro in the opening scene of the film. He is driving across a

desert landscape listening to Yothu Yindi on the radio. He is dressed in

a neat business shirt. To emphasise his obsession with neatness, even

out here, he takes a moment to straighten his hair in the rear view

mirror, a gesture we are invited to read as culturally driven. Here is a

Japanese businessman, we are given to understand, who cannot help

wanting to appear neat, even when no one is watching, except of

course that we (non-Japanese) are. He stops to take a photograph of

himself alone in the vastness of the outback, his camera and his suit

marking him indelibly as tourist rather than resident. Back in the car he appears to have grown impatient with the music, preferring a CD of

Okinawan folk tunes. Presumably his rejection of Yothu Yindi and his

visible relief when the Japanese music starts, are meant to reinforce a

sense of his absolute lack of a connection with the place through which

he is travelling. It also conveniently provides the film with its exotic

soundtrack.

Hiro next appears at the Port Hedland airport. Sandy has been instructed by her boss to fly up from Perth to meet a Japanese man with an unpronounceable name, whose purpose in Western Australia is a mystery. Sandy is late. Hiro sits on his suitcase and waits. When

Sandy arrives he assumes she is a mere driver but nevertheless presents her with his business card. This gives us a chance to laugh at his formality, to register its foreignness in this religiously informal place. Sandy loads his luggage. He gets in the back. He says nothing on the journey except ‘Hai’ to her every incurious question. They arrive at the mine. Hiro’s father’s company, we learn from the mine staff, has a large stake in the operation. Hiro is treated as a welcome, if somewhat feared guest. Still we are no closer to learning the exact purpose of his journey. Nor does Sandy ask. She has already admitted her total ignorance of the Japanese, an ignorance the film presumes the audience shares. Now that they have met it is Sandy’s observation of Hiro, as the

first Japanese she has ever had to deal with, that matters. She finds him rude. We are invited to do the same. She finds his crude English comical. So, it is expected, will we. Effectively constrained by Sandy’s ignorance of his background, culture, and personal history, Hiro remains, for Sandy and for us, a Japanese tourist, polite but impenetrable, earnest but hopelessly ill-equipped by his over-subtle culture to deal with Australia. His subjectivity stifled he cannot be anything other than what he appears. He is in this sense hypervisible, a tourist where tourists don’t normally venture, a sight for the locals to take in rather than the other way around.

Hiro’s hypervisibility is the same as that which afflicts Yukio and

Midori in Heaven’s Burning, making them subject to the critical gaze of the outback’s white natives, those for whom we are asked to believe the desert is home. No matter that this home has been taken by force from its original inhabitants, now made invisible. Films like Japanese

Story, Heaven’s Burning and The Goddess of 1967cannot be concerned with the legitimacy of the claim that whites have on the landscape for that would only serve to compromise their fundamental ideological premise, which is that whiteness normalises the Australian landscape for an audience presumed to be white. The hypervisibility of Asians in the same landscape serves this premise by its fixation on difference. To

be located within Australianness requires sameness rather than difference, and normality rather than unsettling diversity.

Sandy, the geologist, normalises the Pilbara for us, usurping any claim

Hiro might have to the region through his company’s economic interest in it. The Japanese might own the place but only whites can truly belong there, even white women, as long as they conform, as

Sandy does, to the kind of macho can-do philosophy of miners. Hiro is made to gawp at the mine operations like an impressionable child while Sandy stands back looking bored and out of sorts. Sandy, being white, takes open cut mining on a vast scale in her stride. Hiro, being a

Japanese quasi-tourist, wonders at the industrial might on display, reading it, as we are invited to do, as an expression of the natural superiority of white enterprise. The mine tour is not an exercise in informing Hiro about the state of his investments. It is a chance for

Sandy, and us, to watch him in the act of being awed by the power of whiteness to transform the desert into exportable raw materials.

There is an early scene on the beach, following Sandy and Hiro’s tour of the mine, which defines how Asians are to be regarded in a place like this. Sandy, like us, is watching Hiro swim towards the shore. On her knee she has a magazine, inside the covers of which she is hiding a book titled The Japanese. The book is there to remind us who is studying

whom, to reinforce the film’s premise that it is ‘the Japanese’ who require to be studied for they are the exemplars of difference for the purpose of the narrative. Sandy watches Hiro emerge from the water in his modest swimming trunks and towel himself dry. He does this with a small folded towel, Japanese style. He dries himself thoroughly from the legs up, her gaze and ours taking in his slim build, his relative hairlessness, with its suggestion of the feminine, his smoothness. Not so much aroused as amused, Sandy watches him sit down on his small square of towel, cross his legs and straighten his back like an attentive schoolboy. She chuckles and looks away. He fails to acknowledge her presence. Any potential for the scene to have a reciprocal sexual meaning for the characters is lost. For the moment Hiro is represented as asexual, is gazed upon by what Allan Luke (1997, p. 32) has called

‘the normative eye of Western sexuality’, which views Asian male bodies as ‘something Other’.

The gaze on the beach is this narrative’s version of what

Ann E. Kaplan calls (1997, p. 60) the ‘imperial gaze’, the kind of interracial looking relation that grows out of and replicates the colonialist imagination. The gaze is predicated on a racial hierarchy.

‘Only white people ‘, according to bell hooks (quoted in Kapalan, 1997, p. 7), ‘i.e. those conceived as subjects, can observe and see. Since blacks are not constituted as subjects, they cannot look…let alone gaze (in the

sense of dominating, objectifying)’. While Sandy, being a woman as

subject rather than object of the gaze, reverses the conventional

cinematic looking relationship between men and women, she conforms

to the conventional hierarchy governing looking relationships between

white and non-white. She satisfies her curiosity about Hiro’s body, and ours at the same time, while he is denied the opportunity to look back.

She is even, a couple of scenes later, permitted to handle his body,

asexually, as a nurse might handle a sick child. Hiro is drunk. He has

been subjected to the humiliation of singing karaoke in English at the

local pub. His voice is weak, his pronunciation laughable, so bad that

Sandy has to look away. When he is finally released to go back to his

motel he sways out of the pub and falls onto the pavement at Sandy’s

feet. She is sober and in control. He is giggly and legless. She takes

charge of him like a mother might take charge of a teenage son on a

binge, hefting him into the car, folding his legs in under him one by

one, not with any care or intimacy, but with pronounced impatience.

Incapacitated by drink Hiro becomes a doll-like object for Sandy to tidy

away and remove from view before he embarrasses himself and

inconveniences her. Again Hiro is not imagined here as a sexual being,

but rather as a large child in a state of arrested sexual development. As

Kaplan points out (1997, p. 80) it is not uncommon in Hollywood films

for racial Others to be infantilised in this way, to be imagined as

‘helpless and childlike within adult bodies’. This is particularly useful in contexts where the narrative requires that a white woman embody the innate superiority of whiteness and be ‘permitted the place of subject of the gaze – at least in relation to the “natives” ‘(Kaplan, 1997, p. 81). While Sandy is not dealing with a ‘native’ in Hiro, she is having

to do the white man’s work for him, having been ordered to show Hiro

around by her male boss and ex-lover Baird. In this sense she is part of

a gendered and racialised hierarchy within which Hiro is the

Australian equivalent of a childlike ‘native’ - a Japanese tourist.

When Sandy and Hiro do become lovers it is not surprising that Sandy

takes charge. Hiro has petulantly demanded to be driven off the map.

The car has become bogged in the sand. Sandy’s desperate attempts to

get them moving have failed. They have been forced to sleep back to

back on the ground to keep warm. This experience, according to

Felicity Collins, ‘loosens, momentarily, the cultural moorings of

identity’ (2003, n.p.), and opens the way for a sexual encounter to

occur, though not one in which Hiro is permitted to do much more

than to lie back and enjoy it. Sandy literally wears the pants in this

scene, taking Hiro’s business suit trousers and pulling them on before

she comes to lie on top of the prone Hiro. It is hard to read anything

into her gesture other than a desire to be the man, which is in a sense,

what she has been all along. Khoo has pointed to the parallels between

this sexual encounter and that between BG and JM in The Goddess of

1967 (2004). In both cases the white woman is active and on top, the

Japanese man passive and supine on the bottom. Both are ‘painfully obvious’ examples of what Khoo calls (2004) ‘the Australian cinema’s feminisation of the Asian man’, in an attempt to resolve the difficulties of cross-cultural relations by heterosexual means ‘but only through a reconfiguration of gender relations applied to a hierarchy of race’. In other words an anxiety about interracial sex is resolved in both films by reiterating the dominance of the white partner even if this requires that the white woman plays at being a man and the Japanese man plays at being a woman.

Sandy and Hiro, now lovers, set off in the morning on the next leg of their apparently aimless tour of the northwest. But just in case we imagined the screenplay had not thought to provide their next stop with a narrative purpose we see them sitting in a rowboat on an azure sea, with an older man at the oars. What follows, predictably enough, is this film’s equivalent of Cam’s rave to Yukio in Heaven’s Burning.

The old man in the boat is about the same age as Cam, with the same

iconic Australian face shrivelled by the sun until the skin resembles

wood and the pale eyes empty space. He is there to remind Hiro about

the war. In a potted history lesson he tells Hiro that there were

evacuation plans during the war, food squirreled away in the hills.

After the war the local housewives refused to buy anything made in

Japan he says. ‘Now you blokes own the place’. Sandy smiles sadly at

Hiro, able to sympathise with him now that she has taken him as a

lover, but at the same time understanding of the old man’s anxious

need to restate, in the presence of the Other, the premise that

Australianness is whiteness. Coming straight after the sex scene

between Sandy and Hiro the scene in the boat reads like a warning to

Hiro not to get ideas above his station, not to believe that because he

has been taken to bed by a white woman and owns shares in the mines,

he has rights to the land. He does not. He is forever the alien invader.

That is history’s lesson. No matter that the northwest of Western

Australia has been a contested part of the country for all of its recorded

history. No matter that the Japanese dominance of the pearling

industry in Broome in the nineteenth century gave the Japanese a stake

in that part of the country more than half a century before the war, and

implicated them in the damage done to the indigenous people of the

region by its colonisers. Apparently ignorant of his own countrymen’s

exploits in the very waters upon which he is rowing so peaceably, and

strangely indifferent to his own company’s investment in the area now,

Hiro is powerless to speak. In silencing him, the film’s authors

symbolically silence all Asian voices in the country’s history, reserving

the right to speak for white men only. The need to do so possibly arises

out of the screenwriters’ own ignorance of history, or out of a sense of

fear, or both. If Hiro were to speak at this point, to challenge the old man’s version of Australia, a conflict would arise, an argument with the potential to transform the characters involved. Hiro remains silent, the moment passes, and with it the potential for Japanese Story to say

something new about Asian/Australian relations, to embroil Sandy

and Hiro in a struggle to resolve the anxiety their interracial affair is bound to cause if exposed to the wider world.

In order to guarantee that their affair will never be so exposed it is not enough for Hiro to remain silent about his own and his country’s history, he must die. This is the turning point of the narrative, the moment at which it abandons the possibility of taking Hiro into new territory as a major Asian character in a mainstream Australian film.

Before he drowns Hiro expresses his gratitude to Sandy for showing him how to have a good time. His camera is nowhere in sight. His suit has been replaced by a t-shirt and shorts. Sandy, we gather has been responsible for loosing him, temporarily, from the ‘heavy obligations’ he has back home. In the same way that Colin and BG were responsible for turning Midori and JM into carefree drifters, Sandy and the landscape have conspired to teach Hiro a lesson in simple pleasures.

But just as the lesson is learned he is punished for imagining these pleasures might be meant for him. He makes love to Sandy, lies on the rocks naked with her, then drowns diving into the nearby waterhole,

something any real Australian knows not to do. It is a tourist’s death,

an accident waiting to happen, caused by ignorance of the rules. In the

best scene of the film Sandy then drags Hiro’s body out of the water

and struggles to load its dead weight into the car. What follows is her

story, not his. Hiro’s wife makes a brief appearance as the emotionally

restrained Japanese wife, as silent and silenced as her husband, and for

the same reasons. Had she taken Sandy on as a rival for her husband’s

memory a conflict would have arisen, with the potential to transform

both women. Because she fails to speak, the potential for

transformation is unexplored and the drama diverted into a study of

the differing cultural expressions of grieving.

For Felicity Collins the meaning of Hiro’s death is that it breaks down,

by means of grief, ‘the defensive hide that preserves a certain insularity

in Australian national identity’ (2003). Had Hiro lived, her argument

implies, the insularity of the national identity would have remained

intact, for it is fixed and unavailable for dramatic transformation

through conflict. In fact Hiro’s death confirms the insularity of the

Australian national identity in the same way that Aso’s death in Changi

and Yukio’s death in Heaven’s Burning do, by eliminating the

possibility that the Other might break down the national identity by

force of character. Instead of lighting a fire under racial clichés and

stereotypes as Tadashi Suzuki suggests is necessary to transform them into ‘authentic, personal, expressive moments’ (Bogart, 2001, p. 93), the makers of Japanese Story douse the flames. Hiro and Sandy are just getting to know each other, just beginning to explore the anxieties of interracial love, the subtle treacheries of language, the joys of cross cultural adultery, when Hiro drowns, taking all of his possible

authentic, personal, expressive moments with him.

5. Setsuko Forrester: The Japanese as Traveller

The Rushworth War is the second screenplay in the creative practice

component of this study. It is the story of a Japanese woman, Setsuko,

who comes to Australia to unravel her father’s mysterious past.

Together with David, the son of an ex-guard at a wartime camp for

enemy aliens, Setsuko uncovers the little known history of Australia’s

internment of resident Japanese children, of whom her father was one.

David, unhappily divorced and struggling to take care of his father,

falls in love with Setsuko. She goes home to her unsatisfactory

marriage in America. David settles his father into a retirement home

then sets off with his son Rory on a trip to America to find her.

My aim in this work was to fictionalise and dramatise Australia’s

wartime internment of the Japanese in a screenplay for a mainstream

feature film. America’s experience of Japanese internment has been the

subject of a number of Hollywood films, the most recent being Snow

Falling on Cedars ( Dir. Scott Hicks, 1999) but so far no one has managed

to tell the story of the Australian experience in a fictional form. I had

come to know the Australian story by way of a chance meeting with

Queensland historian Yuriko Nagata, whose PhD research into the topic, became the subject of her book Unwanted Aliens: Japanese

Internment in Australia. That book brings together detailed research on

the background of the Japanese in Australia, on the policy of internment both here and in North America, and on the conditions for the internees in the camps. I undertook further research into the

Canadian and American experience in order to better understand some of the ethical and political questions to which the internment gave rise.

I felt very strongly that the screenplay I wrote should reflect these questions and dilemmas while still being engaging as drama.

This is more easily said than done. The danger of writing about a topic which is so little understood in the local context is that it might be dismissed as untrue. The danger of writing a fiction based on historical events is that it might betray the truth of the story for the sake of drama. Either possibility has the potential to undermine the purpose of the work, which is to dramatise an episode in Australia’s multiracial history so that its relevance to contemporary events is felt and understood. Three hundred and fifty of the Japanese internees were children, many of them born in Australia. Although there is no evidence that they were mistreated in the camps, these children and their families were deprived of their freedom solely because of their race. They were removed from their homes, their property was confiscated, often stolen, their educational and professional lives truncated. At the end of the war many who had never been to Japan and had no means of support in that war torn country were sent there

in order, simply, to remove them from Australia. Those that were allowed to remain were often forced to deny their ethnicity, to masquerade as Chinese, in order to protect themselves from the intense

sentiment against the Japanese that the war had created and that the

return of the POWs continued to fuel for a long period after the war’s

end.

My early attempts to tell the story focussed on a boy of about twelve as

its central character. I imagined he had been taken from Broome with

his parents, that his father had been sent to one camp and he and his

mother, brothers and sisters to another. I had read that the internees set

up their own schools within the Rushworth camp and that Australian

born children had often found it difficult to accept the disciplinarian

tone of these makeshift institutions, as some of their parents worried

about the nationalist flavour of the curriculum. This suggested to me

that the boy might be caught between two clear factions within his

compound. Equally I felt that he could be trapped between a sense of

loyalty to his absent father, a Japanese patriot, and his equally strong

love for his half Chinese mother who secretly hopes Japan will lose the

war. As the end of the war draws near and Japan seems doomed to

defeat, the differences within the camp break out into open conflict and

the boy must choose a side. His deportation to Japan at the end of the

war feels like a betrayal. He has never been to Japan. His true home is

Broome. He has left family and friends there who he will never see again. As the listing ship loaded with deportees pulls away from the

Australian coast he bows in the direction of the setting sun, his heart breaking, a sense of desolation spreading through him like a disease.

He has no future in his country of birth. He has no idea what awaits him in the country of his ancestors. He is truly a lost soul.

This version of the screenplay was sound enough as a narrative and

certainly had the potential to illuminate the complex dilemmas of its

central character as an Asian in Australia at a particular point in our

history. However, despite its success at the Moondance International

Film Festival in Boulder, Colorado where it won a Columbine Award

in 2003, it proved hard to sell to producers here. It may be simply that

there are currently very few producers in Australia who have any real

interest in our Asian history. Or it may be that given the relatively

depressed state of the industry, there is very little chance of a

screenplay such as this one, expensive and difficult to cast, finding

support.

In order to maximise the screenplay’s chances of success I decided to

write a low budget version of The Rushworth War, one in which the

story was brought up to date, and in which there were possibilities of

casting known actors in key roles. I particularly wanted to write a role for a Japanese American actor. This had a twofold purpose. Firstly I had become aware of the powerful resonance this story has for

Japanese Americans and wanted to write to that audience, as much as to a local one. I also had a practical motive in that I wanted to make the screenplay attractive to potential producers in the United States. The low budget requirement meant that the story had to be a contemporary one. In this second version everything that occurs in the first version becomes back story and it becomes the job of the contemporary characters to discover what happened to the boy in the camp and what his story means to them. I had by now met the only surviving ex-guard from the Japanese internment camp at Rushworth, a man in his late seventies. He had given me the basis for the character of Frank, David’s father. Frank’s connection with Goh Maeda, the boy in the camp who subsequently became Setsuko’s father, is the subject of the screenplay in its current version.

I imagined that the boy about whom I had written in the first version of the story had somehow survived in post war Japan but had been haunted by his experiences as an adolescent in the internment camp, particularly by his relationship with Frank. The nature of that relationship I couldn’t at first define. I thought that Frank had probably been in love with Hanako, the boy’s mother, and had managed to have

a secret affair with her in the camp. I thought that Frank had been sent away to avoid a scandal, and had been unable to save Hanako and Goh from deportation at the end of the war as he had promised he would.

He had married David’s mother and successfully buried his secret until sixty years later when Goh shows up in Brisbane. When Goh dies of a heart attack in his hotel room it falls to his estranged daughter Setsuko to come to Brisbane from America, where she has lived for the past twenty years, to bury him. Setsuko barely knows her father. He left her mother when Setsuko was still a child. Her grandmother Hanako raised her while her mother went to work and in all those years never revealed a word about her life in Australia. It was as if it had never happened. In Brisbane Setsuko is faced with a choice. She can bury her father’s secret history with him, or she can stay and investigate his past. She decides to stay. With David’s help she struggles to come to terms with the truth about her father. With Setsuko’s help David struggles to come to terms with Frank’s mortality. Together they discover the transcendent power of love, and the human need for hope.

It was not until after I had finished the second version of the story that

I realised Frank’s true love had not been Hanako, but Goh himself. It

was they who had been secret lovers in the camp, a piece of news that

surprised me, but which made a great deal of sense, given their

passionate desire to be reunited after a separation of sixty years.

In writing Setsuko as a liminal character, a woman between two worlds, who is Japanese but lives in America, who is a bridge for Frank between the present and the past, I found a freedom to depart from clichés and stereotypes about the Japanese. I had been striving for the same freedom in writing about the boy in the camp but had always come up against the logic of the internment itself, which determined

that the Japanese were the enemy by their appearance alone. The boy’s story had inevitably fallen into discussions about Japaneseness and what it constitutes, which were not uninteresting, but which felt less like drama than expressions of racial anxiety. By contrast Setsuko was able to carry the narrative beyond questions of race. As a mature woman with her own complex history she was able to exert force as a character, to behave in unexpected ways, to surprise herself and us with the power of her individuality, rather than to settle us into familiar ethnically determined narrative patterns. In this way she represents nothing but herself. She is not ‘overdetermined from without’ in the way that Aso and Yukio are by the need to be savage, or in the way that JM and Hiro are by the need to be sexually passive.

She is not silenced in the way that Hiro’s wife is despite having every excuse to scream. In writing Setsuko, as in writing Sam Nakadai, I was able to leave Japaneseness out of the picture, to decenter race as the narrative focus, to make the gaze a mutual one between equally

curious and desiring adults. My Australian Life and The Rushworth War

are not what Gina Marchetti calls ‘narratives of salvation’ (1993,

p. 218). They do not assume a threat is embodied in the Asian Other,

requiring that the Other be eliminated and whiteness rescued so that

its dominance may continue disguised as ‘Australianness’. What they

do assume is that ‘a polycultural society… requires ever-increasing

negotiations of multiple realms of difference’ (Machida, 2003, p. xiii).

Setsuko is a traveller in the sense that she is open to transformation by

curiosity and desire. Her openness demands of the other characters in

the screenplay, and of an imagined audience, an effort to move beyond

difference, an effort to identify Setsuko’s desire to know the truth as

their own. ‘Theatre’, according to Helene Cixous (1989, p.13) is ‘the

desire of all the others. It’s the desire of all the characters, the

audience’s desire, the actors’ desire, the director’s desire, it’s the desire

of the others that are us’. In The Rushworth War Goh and Frank,

homosexual lovers across barriers of racial enmity, become central to a

past notion of Australianness. Setsuko and David, interracial lovers

across barriers of convention and geography, become central to a contemporary notion of Australianness, as does David’s teenage son

Rory who, it is increasingly obvious in the work, is gay. In this way the

screenplay seeks to reflect our real diversity, rather than our imagined whiteness, and tries to negotiate difference rather than to eliminate it.

( The Rushworth War, the screenplay, is intended to be read here)

79 THE CONTENTS OF THIS DOCUMENT ARE PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

THE RUSHWORTH WAR

By Cory Taylor

AWG Registration #8109

JULY 2004 COPYRIGHT: CORY TAYLOR 1 EXT AIRPORT EVENING 1

A 31AZ flight touches down at Brisbane International Airport. 2 INT/EXT AIRPORT EVENING 2 DA, a Japanese man in his seventies, looking tired and unwell, pushes through the crowd to collect his modest luggage from the luggage carousel, He exits through the doors and queues for a taxi. 3 EXT HOTEL EVEN1NG 3 Goh climbs out of the taxi and takes his luggage from the back seat. As the taxi drives away Goh makes his way towards the hotel entrance. FRANK (V.O.) Dear Goh, I am so happy to hear Ghat you are corning to Australia at last. I remember you very well of course,., 4 INT FRANK'S STUDY EVENING 4 K, dressed to go out, and sporting a red bow tie, stands in his study pulling out old photograph albums from a chaotic pile of stuff. The room is a mess of boxes, files, documents spilled over every surface. Ne searches through one or two, but ip-npatiently, as if he can't find what he's looking for. FRANK (V.O.) ... And your mother* Not a day goes past when I don't think of her. She was a very brave woman to whom a great wrong was done... Be searches on his desk. The study has been well. organised at one tiale but Frank is losing his memory and his sense of order along with it. Frank is increasingly impatient with himself, He has lost something important. 5 INT HOTEL ROOM EVENING 5 Goh, showered and changed, swallows a couple of pills with a whisky. He pulls Frank's letter from his ticket wallet and checks the return address on the top of the page. He pauses to re-read the letter, Be touches the words on the page tenderly with his fingertip.

(CONTINUED) 5 CONTINUED :

...I m so glad to have finally found you, as you are one of the few links I have with that time... Goh opens a tourist map of Brisbane and finds the street address on the letter, marking it with a highlighter. Be refolds the map, takes out an airline eye mask and puts it on, We inserts earplugs* He lies down on the bed.

R (V,O.f (CQNT'D) .,,My brief years at Rushworth were the happiest of my life. There have been many times when I have felt that what I learned there was the most important lesson anyone can learn...

Fxank holds the photograph be has been looking for in his trembli.ng.hand. It is an old black and white picture of a Japanese woman 0, and a boy, GOH AGED 15, They are sitting on the steps of whst looks like an army hut. Frank touches the image of the boy with his unsteady fingertips. INT HOTEL ROOM EVENING 7 Goh lies very still on the bed.

...which is to cherish every moment as if it were your last. The phone beside his bed starts to ring, Goh ignores it. INT HOTEL CORRIDOR MOWING 8 The newt morning the HOTEL NAGER, watched by a CHINESE WO GLEANER, enters Goh's room and finds him dead on the bed. He looks peaceful enough. The earplugs and face mask are on the bedside table. The television is on. The weather report.

TV WEATHE The weather for this Anzac Day weekend is looking good, (MORE)

(CONTINUED) 8 CONTINUED: TV WEATHEWN (CONT ' D) Brisbane is headed for a maximum of 26 today, fine weather continuing for Sunday and Monday ... CLEANER I switch on television and see him in the mirror, The manager looks around the room. He goes to the television and switches it off. He sees his own reflection in the mirror, and the lime green chair in the corner. He steps to one side until he can see the body on the bed. On the small table by the window he sees some Japanese gifts, a half empty bottle of whisky, a glass, some chips and peanuts and a couple of bars of chocolate. He looks at the bundle of letters on the dresser, at Frank's letter, Beside them is the small photograph Frank found in his study. He looks at the body on the bed. MANAGER It's the first time I've lost anyone. The cleaner looks at the body. She makes the sign of the cross.

INT PLANE MORNING 9 SETSUKO, a woman in her thirties, exhausted and dishevelled, bearing a marked resemblance to Hanako in the photograph, sits on a Qantas plane as it approaches Brisbane. She is reading Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. A STEWARD distributes juice. It is early morning. The PASSENGERS wake reluctantly, looking weary of travelling. Setsuko looks up from her book. STEWARD Orange or apple. SETSUKO Nothing.

The MAN sitting next to her opens his bleary eyes. W(TO THE STEWARD) What's the time? STEWARD Just after 4.30. The man peers at his watch. MAN It's always 4.30.

(CONTINUED) 9 CONTINUED:

The steward offers him an orange juice. He takes it, opens it and sips, He groans. Setsuko steals a glance at him, The man looks blearily out the window. It is still dark outside. The voice of a stewardess is heard over the PA system. STEWARDESS (V.O.) Ladies and gentlemen. In approximately one hour and forty-five minutes we will be landing at Brisbane International Airport. , , MAN See Brisbane and die. 10 INT MORGUE DAY 10 Setsuko, looking tired and washed out, stands beside a slab where Goh's body is laid out. She looks at Goh's face for a moment, She reaches out to touch his face but can't. She withdraws her hand, glancing up at the waiting ATTENDANT. He gently replaces the sheet covering the body.

12 INT POLICE STATION DAY 11 A YOUNG POLICEWOW sits next to Setsuko. On a table on front of them are Goh's belongings, Setsuko stares at them, POLICEWOMAN Did your father have a history? Setsuko looks at her, unsure of what she means. SETSUKO Pardon me? POLICEWOMAN Did he have a heart problem? SETSUKO I don't know. I know nothing about my father. She looks back at the things on the table. She can see the letters and travel documents in their plastic bage She glances at his suitcase standing in the corner.

(CONTINUED) 11 CONTINUED:

POLICEWOrnN It's always a shock*

SETSUKO I haven't seen him for a long time, POLICEWO When you lose them so suddenly. SETSUKO He left years ago. POLICEWO Do you know why he was here? SETSUKO 1 was hoping you could tell me, POLICEWO I'm sorry. She looks at the policewoman. SETSUKO How did you find me? The policewoman takes the plastic bag and finds a photograph. She takes it out and hands it to Setsuko. Setsuko sees it is a photograph of herself and her son, taken a long time ago when the boy was about eight, She turns the photograph over and on the back is written Setsuko and Ken Forrester above her last two addresses in Axnerica. The photograph is well-fingered* She hands it: back to the policewoman who puts it back in the bag. She pushes the bag across the desk towards Setsuko. PQLICEWO You can have these. Setsuko stares at the bag, afraid to take it. SETSUKO What for?

The policewman takes a small notebook out of the bag and opens it, On the opening page Goh has made a list of names and addresses and phone nu~ersalongside dates, POLICEWO We had plans to see people, Setsuko takes the book and looks at the list. 11 CONTINUED: (2)

SETSUKO Who are they? The policewoman sees that Setsuko's hands are shaking. POLICEWOrnN ff you need any help to find them, you can let u@ know. SETSUKO Why would I want to find them? POLICEWO You've come all this way. SETSUKO I needed a break, They stare at each other. The policewoman is somehow quietly insistent, Setsuko picks up the bag containing the letters and places the notebook back inside it. The policewoman picks up Goh's suitcase and sees Setsuko to the door. POLICEWOMAN When my father died we were all, there to say goodbye, ALL his friends and family. It helped, SETSUKO Who did it help? POL1CEWO Me, SETSUKO Good for you, 12 INT SETSUKO'S HOTEL ROOM DAY 12 Back in her hotel room Setsuko throws the bas of letters on the bed. A few letters and photographs spill out: She stares at them malevolently, She shuffles through them roughly, angrily. Finally she picks out the photograph of herself and Ken and stares at it, She picks up the phone and dials home. Ken answers.

(CONTINUED) 12 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO Ken?. . . It's mom... Did I wake you?,., I'm here, Have you got a pen? She grabs the hotel information folder next to the phone and tells him the name and nwnber of the hotel, As she speaks she fingers through the letters again, this time more gently, She picks up Frank's letter and cowares the address at the top of the page with the list in the notebook. Frank's name and address are at the top of the list, above Nakamura and Watson. SETSUKO(CONT'D) Is dad home?... What time is it? Did he say when he'd be back?.., No no... Tell him to ring me. How'd you go in your history paper? Oh*.. well let me know. Another photograph slips out of the bundle, the one of Hanako and Goh as a teenage bay, Setsuko stares at it, SETSUKO (CONT'D) Don't feed the dog too much.,* Okay ...Be home as soon as I can, Be good. She hangs up. She picks up the photograph and turns it over, On the back is written 16lbta;ten&~ ensd @oh Meneda, Rushwor&h, 1944. She puts the photograph down and picks up a Letter, She takes it out of it envelope and starts to read, EDNA(V-0.) Dear Mr Naeda, Of course I remember you, You were so often in the hospital with one ailment and another.., 13 EXT COUNTRY TOWPS/ST~ET DAY 13 A small fading house sits in an overgrown garden. EDNA, in her eighties, makes her way down the front path to the letterbox. She Looks inside. Nothing today, EDNA(V.0.) ...I nursed you through chickenpox and numerous asthma attacks, some of them quite serious, but you always pulled through,., 14 INT EDNA'S KITCHEN DAY 14 Inside Edna makes herself a cup of tea. The place is sparse and tidy. The fridge displays family snaps of grandniece's and nephews, signed in childish hand TO GREAT AUNT EDNA. EDNA(V.0.) Mr Chambers called you a natural survivor, like himself. Edna's old hands heap the sugar into her hot tea. She adds a slosh of brandy, EDNA (V.O.) (CONT'D) ,..I was so pleased to hear you had finally managed to contact him. You and he were inseparable companions I remember... She sits down and sips her brandy tea staring at a postcard from Japan attached to the fridge. She takes it down and looks at the back, The postcard is a note from Goh, confirming his arrival. She stares at his signature at the end of the note, GO& Haeala. INT CREMATORIUM DAY 15 Setsuko sits alone at her father's cremation. She stands dry eyed watching her father's coffin slide soundlessly away behind a screen. EDNA(V.0.) CONT. ...which had a lot to do with your appetite for chocolate and his ability to lay his hands on limitless supplies. Tt will be very nice to see you when you are in Australia. Please let me know if there are any changes to your plans, otherwise I will expect you the week after Anzac Day. Fond Regards Edna Watson. Setsuko makes her way to the doors of the chapel. She stands alone on the steps in the glaring Brisbane light. EXT EDNA'S VERANDA DAY 16

Edna stands alone on her back veranda. In front of her is a view across empty fields.

( CONTINUED ) 16 CONTINUE D :

EDNA(V.0.) Perhaps on the day you would like to see Rushworth again, It might help you to lay some ghosts to rest. 17 EXT SOCCER PITCH DAY 17 An under fifteen's soccer match. RORY, Frank's fourteen year old grandson, stands in goal, looking very tense and uncomfortable. He is a gangly, sweet-faced boy, obviously effeminate. 18 EXT STANDS DAY 18 Frank sits in the stands next to DAVID, his son, in his forties, David watches the action avidly as the opposition WINGER intercepts a pass and makes a run. DAVID Who's marking him?! No onel Come on guys ! He glances at Frank who is taking no notice of the match. Frank is carefully unwrapping a chocolate, He puts it in his mouth. 19 EXT SOCCER PITCH DAY 19 Rory faces the winger. A DEFENDER crashes in for a late tackle, sending the winger flying, The REFEREE blows his whistle hard, flashes a yellow card at the defender, awards the attacking team a penalty, There is a cry of protest from the stands. Rory's TEAN MATES gather around the goal, accusations flying. RORY (INEFFECTUmLY) You gotta mark up boys! You're not marking up! He sounds like a girl. Another PLAYER on his team mimics him. PLAYER You gotta mark up boys! There is general laughter.

20 EXT STANDS DAY 20 Frank stares at the unfamiliar chocolate wrapper in his hand, He suddenly remembers something he can't make sense of. 21 INT HOTEL ROOM EVENING 21

A FLASHBACK. Frank stands in Goh's hotel roam staring at a game of rugby on the sports report. Be switchea it off. The picture disappears. He sees some chocolates on the shelf under the light, in the Bame unfamiliar wrappers, He picks them up and puts them in his pocket, Frank catches sight of himself in the mirror. Me is wearing a red bow tie, He sees the lime green chair reflected behind him.

22 EXT SOCCER PITCH DAY 22 Out on the pitch Rory pushes his hair off his face, We stands alone in the goal mouth as the WINGER winds up and boots the ball. Rory dives one way, the ball screams past him the other way straight into the back of the net, The REF bLows his whistle for the end of the match. Rory lies face down in the dirt, The OPPOSITION TEAM goes wild. Rory's tern mates ignore him, They flock instead to the bay who drew the penalty. BOYS It's all right Thomo, Don't worry about it. It wasn't a fucking penalty. That ref sucks. Rory gets up out of the dirt, He is in tears. 23 EXT STANDS DAY Frank still looks confused.

Z have to go home now. David wishes he hadn't brought him, DAVID We're going. Disgusted, angry, David marches off down the steps, AN ASIAN takes Prank by the arm to help him down, Prank stares at him, FMNM 1 shouldn't have come. The man smiles.

(CONTINUER) 23 CONTINUED:

ASIAN MAN Be's still new in goal. He'll improve. They reach the bottom of the stairs, The man lets go of Prank's arm,

Will he be all right? David turns and glares at Frank, DAVID Who? Frank looks confused as the Asian man walks off. Re and David exchange a look of mutual incomprehension. 24 INT CAR DAY 24 Rory sits in the back of the car, humiliated, his face still grubby with tears. David pulls out of the club driveway and into the street, Frank beside him in the front. DAVID You've got to get those bloody defenders organised! You're not talking enough, RORY Yeah, yeah,

What was the score? David glances at Frank. ROKY Two one.

Well. done, David and Rory both stare ahead glumly, 25 EXT SUBURBAN STREET DAY 25 Frank sits in the car and waits while David and Rory go inside,

(CONTINUED ) 25 CONTINUED :

Be looks around as David's ex-wife PWELA appears at the front door, She gives Frank a wave. Frank waves back.

26 DAY 26 Rory goes inside ahead of Pamela.

How'd you go? His silence indicates to her he went badly. David hesitates to come in.

DAVID (TO RORY) Have your shower at grandad's place.

Come in for a minute, She smiles at him, but coldly. Be follows her inside. PMELA (COMT'D) I wanted a talk. From the next room Rory calls out.

RORY (O/S j Mum! Where's those black pants? David looks around the kitchen as if he's inspecting it for dust e

What black pants? RORY (o/s) The three quarter ones!

PWEZA On the line, They should be dry. Don't forget your pyjamas!

RORY (o/s) I don't wear pyjamas.

Pamela watches him light a cigarette. She makes him nervous. PMELA I'm getting married.

(CONTXNUED) 26 CONTINUED :

David sits down on a stool, to stop himself from falling down. PAMELA (CONT'D) Martin's asked me to marry him. DAVID Who? PAMELA The seeds man. DAVID He wears stubbies. Pamela gives him a look. It's actually none of his business. PAMELA I wanted to tell you before I tell Rory . DAVID Why? PAMELA That's a stupid question. DAVID If you say so. PAMELA I didn't want you to hear from him. PRMELA (CONT'D) And I don't want him to hear from you. So don't say anything. Please. David doesn't say anything. PAMELA (CONT'D) Has he said anything to you? DAVID I thought he didn't know. PAMELA Does he ever talk about Martin? DAVID No. That's a kind of mutual agreement we have. Rory draws the line at stubbies.

(CONTINUED) 26 CONTINUED: (2)

They look at each other for a long moment. DAVID (CONT'D) Was that all? PAMELA Sure David. That was all. She unpacks the shopping, slamming things into cupboards. David watches her in silence. He is angry, shocked, PAMELA (CONT'D) At some point you have to let go of the past, DAVID What does that mean? Let go of the past. What else have we got? Pamela is upset, PAMELA I like to think I have a future. Rory appears at the door with his weekend bag packed. He dumps it and goes to the fridge for a long swig of soft drink. Pamela talks to him now, faking cheerfulness. PAMELA (CONT'D) Water only for the rest of the day. Rory keeps gulping. PAMELA (CONT'D) Don't fall off a ladder or anything will you. David is already leaving. PAMELA trails after Rory and gives him a kiss as he leaves* He throws his arms around her and kisses her, PAMELA (CONT'D) See you next week. Give my love to Maddie when you see her. RORY Bye mum. Love you.

(CONTINUED) 26 CONTINUED: (3)

PL41CIIELA Love you too.

27 EXT/TNT CAR DAY 27 David gets in and slams his door hard. Rosy climbs in the back.

David leans over and starts rummaging in the glove box. He finds an empty cigarette packet, smells it, screws it up then chucks it violently out the window,

DAVID Fuck * He starts the car and pulls away. Rory stares out at the cigarette packet as they speed past it.

He takes out a mobile phone and starts playing a game on it. David glances in the mirror at him, looking irritated.

28 EXT FIZBNK'S GARDEN DAY 28 Rory is up a stepladder snipping expertly at a hedge out the front of Frank's house. David is piling up the trimmings,

DAVID Dad !

There is no reply. David goee off around the side and finds Frank standing on the path looking blank, Re looks around at David.

DNXD (CONT'D) The bin. Frank looks completely stricken by these sudden blanks he has. David offers no words of comfort.

DAVID (CONT'D) What day is it?

Fuck you,

Be gets the bin and hauls it along the path leading to the front, David follows. David watches Frank hurl the trimings into the bin, demnstrating his fitness.

DAVID What day's rubbish day?

( CONTINUED ) 28 CONTINUED :

Thursday. Rory glances at Frank and sees the anger in him.

DAVID When's the auction? FRANK The fourth. Rory glances at his father, picking up the hostility there is between he and Frank.

RORY When's my birthday dad?

David looks up at him. He has forgotten momentarily,

FRAlvlK July seventh, David turns and glares at him. FRANK (CONT'D) I remember what I want to remember.

DAVID Yeah that'd be right.

He looks up at Rory,

DAVID (CONT'D) Never remembered my birthday. The dog suddenly leaps up and starts to bark, loping out into the road where a taxi has pulled up, David, Frank and Rory watch Setsuka climb out and pay the driver, Setsuko looks up at the three of them standing out the front of the house, An AUCTION sign is posted by the front gate, Frank clutches onto the bin beside him. The sight of Setsuko has visibly upset him. He watches her approach the house, David calls the dog off,

DAVID (CONT'D) Shutup Barry*

( CONTIWED) Setsuko smiles joylessly. SETSUKO Hi. DAVID Hi. SETSUKO My name's Setsuko Forrester. I'm looking for a Mr Frank Chambers. David looks around and watches his father's face register a kind of confused shock,

YQU cme too. Setsuko takes Frank's letter out of her bag and approaches Frank. We appears a little unsteady. Setsuko offers him the letter, but he wipes his hands nervously on his pants and won't take it. He looks to avid for help, He can't understand what's being asked of him. DAVID (TO SETSUKO) come inside. SETSUKO I'm Goh Maeda's daughter.

DAVID Please, Come in. They look at each other for a moment. DAVID (CONT'D) We need a break.

Frank and Setsuko sit on the veranda in silence. Frank reads the letter then stares hard at Setsuko.

What d~ you want? She is taken aback by his abrupt manner but not intimidated.

(CONTINUED) 29 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO You knew my father. David comes out with the coffee. Rory follows with some biscuits. SETSUKO (CONT'D) He was planning to see you. Rory picks up the letter and reads it. FRANK I knew him in the camp. SETSUKO I'm sorry? David hands Setsuko a coffee. DAVID Frank was a guard at an enemy alien camp in the war. Happiest time of his life, wasn't it dad. Setsuko watches Rory take out the photograph of Hanako and Goh on the steps of the army hut. FRANK Is he coming to see me? Rory looks at the photograph before handing it to Frank. He sees Frank's hands are shaking. Hanako and Goh stare out of the photograph. SETSUKO He died. Frank doesn't seem to hear her. FRANK That's him. And that's his mother Hanako. It's written on the back. I wrote it on the back so I'd remember. He looks up at Setsuko. FRANK (CONT'D) Did you know him? SETSUKO Not really.

(CONTINUED) 29 CONTINUED: (2)

FWK They went to Tokyo after the war, I haven't seen them in over fifty years. Is he well? Rory and David exchange a glance. SETSUKO He 's dead. Frank is confused. He has another flash of memory he can't place or make sense of.

30 INT GOB'S HOTEL ROOM EVENING 30 A FLASHBACK, Frank is in the hallway of Goh's hotel room. He puts his hand on the door handle, opens the door and leaves the room. The door as it closes behind him makes a sickening thud. INT/ExT FRANK'S VEF?ANDA DAY 3 1 Visibly upset, Frank gets up and goes into the house. SETSUKO (to DAVID)Irm sorry. DAVID It's okay. She looks at him. SETSUKO I've been given this list of people he was planning to see, DAVID Do you know any of them? SETSUKO No. I'm a stranger here. She takes Goh's notebook out of her bag and hands it to David. He opens it at the front page and sees the list. DAVID Dad kept track of everyone. He knows them all. If that will help. He hands the notebook back. Setsuko puts the book back in her bag.

(CONTINUED) 31 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO Where's Rushworth? DAVID Victoria, She watches David Light a cigarette. SETSUKO Do you mind? She indicates his cigarettes on the table. DAVID Go ahead, She takes a cigarette. SETSUKO This is my last one. David smiles and lights it for her. SETSUKO (CONT'D) Row long was he there for? DAVID The story changes. Sometimes he was shot up in New Guinea before he went. Sometimes he was there the whole time. We don't really know. She stares at him, Re looks away, DAVID (CONT'D) He's a bit of a mystery man, He looks at her. DAVID (CONT'D) Maybe your dad had something on him, He smiles at the thought, RORY (TO DAVID) The thing he's been hiding from you all these years. David gets up and goes inside calling to Frank. mID Dad? What's the problem?

(CONTINUED) 31 CONTINUED: (2)

Rory offers Setsuko a biscuit, She declines. SETSUKO You're like your grandfather. RORY People keep saying that. They smile at each other, making a connection. 32 DAY 32 While Frank rumages through boxes of papers David looks out the window, He can see Setsuko. She intrigues him. Frank finds what he's looking for. FWK They helped him to find me. DAVID Who? FRANK The Nakamuras. DAVID Were you lost? Frank hands David a photograph of a couple of dozen raggedy children lined up in school photo formation. He points out two teenagers in the back row, FEtANK Tom and Mag. DAVID What a memory. They exchange a vaguely antagonistic look. Frank picks up a book and I.eaves the room. David follows.

K' S VEmDA DAY 33

Setsuko reads the back of -the photograph, 42he J&psn@se Schsol, Rushwosth 1944, She turns it over and looks at the children in their rows* Frank points out the Nakamuras.

They were married in the camp.

(CONTINUED) 33 CONTINUED:

Setsuko points to Goh in the front row, looking serious. SETSUKO Ny father? K has a closer look,

That's him. And that's me. He points to the young Frank, K(CONT,) (CONT'D) And that's your grandfather, Be was the schoolmaster. Be points to BIDE0 DA, the unsmiling man on the end of the row, Setsuko looks at him. FRANK (CONT'D) He died in the camp. DAVID How? Frank suddenly shuts down.

f wasn't there. DAVID Where were you?

I'd was sicke They sent me away, DAVID Well would the Nakmuras know? Maybe we could ask them, Frank looks at Setsuko.

f was very young you see. Barely out of my teens. SETSUKO May I take this and copy it? Would you mind?

I'd prefer you didn't.

( CONTINUED) 33 CONTINUED: (2)

He takes the photograph from her. DAVID That's all right. She won't lose it. SETSUKO It doesn't matter. David snatches the photograph from Frank and hands it to Setsuko. DAVID Take it. She takes it. DAVID (CONT'D) And take the book. It's all in there. Frank's glorious war. She looks at the book. It is called The? Rushworth Story by Jan Nakamura, FRRNK I told everything I know to that woman. She looks up at Frank. He glares at David then storms off into the house. David raise his eyebrows at Setsuko like a naughty boy who's been winding his father up, which is exactly what he has been doing, 34 EXT GARDEN DAY 34 David is holding up a tortoise for Setsuko to see. They are standing by a garden pond at the back of the house. The tortoise has its head in. DAVID He's not going to talk to you. SETSUKO I had one when I was a kid, But it vanished. I think my grandmother cooked it. David talks right in the tortoise's face.

(CONTINUED) 34 CONTINUED:

DAVID D'you hear that? Watch yourself. He puts the tortoise down on the ground. It doesn't move. DAVID (CONT'D) Why didn't she ever tell you about Rushworth? SETSUKO Ashamed I guess. DAVID It was the highlight of Frank's life. Everything after the war was a disappointment. He looks at her.

DAVID (CONT ' D) Usually he loves an audience. SETSUKO I'm the enemy. She looks at him and smiles. 35 INT FRANK'S KITCHEN DAY 35 Frank is washing up the tea things. He is staring out the window at Setsuko and David. Rory comes in and goes to the fridge. He gets a glass and pours himself some milk, FRANK Who is that? Rory comes to the window. RORY David. Your son. FRANK The woman. RORY Her father was a friend of yours, Frank stares out the window. FRANK I don't want to talk to her.

(CONTINUED) 35 CONTINUED :

RORY Why not?

Tell her not to come here again. RORY What are you frightened of? He puts a ch hand on Frank's shoulder, Frank breaks away from him and goes out onto the back porch. Me calls out to Setsuko,

I've said all J'm going to say! Please leave now! RORY Grandad! That's not very nicel Rory watches his grandfather storm back into the house and disappear into the study slamming the door behind him. 36 INT FRANK'S STUDY DAY 36 Frank leans back on the door. His breath is coming too fast, He is sweating. He has to hold himself up to stop from falling.

37 DAY 37 Rory stands watching as David and Setsuko climb into David's car. David calls out to Rory, DAVID Back in ten minutes! Hold the fort! Rory salute8 limply. Frank appears at the study window, SeLsuko waves to him. He makes no move to wave back. SETSUKO J don't think he likes me. DAVID He's not good with strangers. Bnd we're all strangers now. 38 INT/EXT CRR. DAY David drives in silence. DAVID How long are you staying? She looks out the window, suddenly sad. SETSUKO Not long. I should get home. DAVID You want a drink? She looks at him. SETSUKO No thanks. DAVID Me neither.

39 ENT HOTEL BAR RAY Setsuko and David sit in a corner drinking. SETSUKO Where's your wife? DAVID E'm divorced. SETSUKO Since when? DAVID A year. My fault. I lost myself in my work. She smiles. DAVID (CONT'D) Is your husband Japanese? Setsuko looks away. SETSUKO No. DAVID What does he do?

(CONTINUED) 39 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO He works for a publisher. I translate. That's how we met, DAVID How old is your son? SETSUKO Nineteen, DAVID You must have been about twelve when you bad him. She laughs. DAVID (CONT'D) Did he know your father? SETSUKO My dad left when I was in elementary school. DAVID What about your grandmother? SETSUKO She waited for him to come back. We waited together. David looks at her. SETSUKO (CONT'D) What about you? What do you do? DAVID I wait for my life to come back. She smiles. DAVID (COMT'D) Did I say something funny? David looks serious, He has a deadpan manner she finds hard to read. That is his intention, DAVID (CONT'D) I'm looking after Frank, SETSUKO Full the?

(CONTINUED) 39 CONTINUED: (2)

DAVID Until something better comes along. SETSUKO You don't have a job? DAVID Nope. He pauses. DAVID (CONT'D) I used to sell real estate but I was faking it, SETSUKO Imagine that. DAVID Just a matter of time before my lack of ambition was discovered. I blame Frank. She smiles. DAVID (CONT'D) I was unloved as a child. He stares at her, seriously. DAVID (CONT'D) According to my ex-wife that's why I lack confidence, She stops smiling. DAVID (CONT'D) I think I'm unworthy of success and love and happiness. I could go on. The list is long. He drinks. SETSUKO Sounds like everyone I know. DAVID My ex-wife tells me I have to let go of the past. SETSUKO She's probably right.

( CONTINUED ) 39 CONTINUED: (3)

DAVID But you came when your father died. SETSUKO I did, DAVID You can't let go of something you don't understand. It sits here. Like a stone. He puts his hand on his heart, DAVID (CONT'D) According to our beloved counsellor. Mrs Krugle, with her cat's bum mouth. David pouts in an impersonation of Mrs Krugle.Setsuko smiles then looks away. The lobby is filling up with KOREAN TOURISTS fresh off a bus. SETSUKO I just came for a holiday. DAVID Course you did. She stands up abruptly, She holds out her hand. He stands up and takes it. SETSUKO It was nice meeting you. DAVID We can take you to the Nakamuras. SETSUKO It's okay. I can go on my own. DAVID Frank knows more than he's letting on.

David lets go of her hand. She turns towards the lift. The lift doors open and a group of Japanese tourists gets out while Setsuko disappears inside. David looks after her almost hungrily. 40 INT HOTEL CORRIDOR DAY

A MOMENT LATER David waits outside Setsuko's door* She opens it, He is agitated.

DAVID 1 think we should help each other, She doesn't invite him in. SETSURO You think we should Euck.

He is shocked. She imdiately regrets saying that. She hangs her head. SETSUKO (CONT'D) Hey I'm really tired. 1 don't know why I said that.

DAVID Frank is normally happy to see people from the old days* You scared him. SETSUKO I'm sorry.

DAVID No it was good,

David looks at her imploringly.

DAVID (CONT'D) Be's fading fast. I don't have a lot of time. I'm just trying to get him to talk, SETSUKO Not interested. Sorry. I've got my own shit. He stops back as she slowly but insisten'tly closes the door,

INT SETSUKO'S HOTEL ROOM EVENING 41 Setsttko goeEt i.nto the room. She picks up her father's letters and notebook. His suitcase is sitting in the corner. She opens it, There are a few neatly packed shirts and a couple of pairs of trousers, socks, underwear,

(CONTINUED) 41 CONTINUED: She puts her hand on a shirt, picks it up and puts it to her face. She looks at herself in the mirror. She is crying. She sits on the floor and cries into the shirt, SETSUKO Shit, Shit, Fuck. LATER she lies asleep on the bed. She wakes. She looks at the clock, She turns on the light, She picks up the phone. SETSUKO (CONT'D) Hello. I'm in room 528. X'm wondering if there are any phone messages for me...Room 528...11m expecting a call from the States, Okay .,,No... thank you that was all. She puts the phone down. She gets up and turns the tel-evision on. The newsreaders chat,.. NEWSREADER #1 What are your plans for the long weekend Rod?

NEWSREADER #2 I take my kids to the parade every year, Wouldn't miss it, NEWSREmER #1 Hakes you proud to be an Australian. IN% FRANK'S HOUSE NIGHT 42 Rory and David are watching television in the living room. The remains of dinner on the table behind them. David gets up to clear the plates. He glimpses the light on under the study door. He pauses to listen a,tthe door then goes into th.e kitchen. LNT FRANK'S STUDY NIGHT 43 Frank sees a small file box under his desk and drags it out into the open. Inside he finds a small dusty envelope on top of a pile of letters. He opens it and takes out a photograph of Hanako taken on the veranda of the hospital. Frank gazes at it. Ranako smiles broadly, looking straight into the camera. 44 EXT/INT RUSHWORTH HOSPITAL DAY 44

A FLASHBACK. Wanako laughs into the camera. She is sitting in the bright sunshine on the veranda of the hospital at Rushworth camp. Facing her is the YOUNG F K, aged twenty, in his hospital pyjamas, We aims his camera at her and looks down into its viewfinder. He gazes at the image of Hanako floating there dimly in the glass. We takes the shot then looks up at her, into her eyes, She returns his gaze.

The YOUNG GOM, also in his pyjamas, sits in the shade of the low veranda roof, watching them closely, willing Frank to look at him, Frank glances up at him. They exchange a smile.

45 INT DAVID'S CAR DAY 45 Rory and Frank sit in the back af the car outside Setsuko's hotel.

Where are we?

RORY Picking up a friend of dad's. David and Setsuko emerge through the doorway of the hotel and head towards the car, Frank stares out the window at 5etsuk0, He obviously doesn't remember her. FWK Wave I met her?

RORY No. She's new.

EXT SETSURO'S HOTEL DAY 46 David and Setsuko pause while a taxi pulls across in front of them, Setsuko looks upset, under pressure, xel-uctant to be here,

DAVID She said she reme&ers your grandmother's cooking. Setsuko says nothing. They walk towards the car.

(CONTTNUED) 46 CONTINUED:

DAVID (CONT'D) They all worked in the kitchens together. She still says nothing. DAVID (CONT'D) He ended up as a chef in the Menzies Hotel. In the sixties. When they made it back here. They reach the car. He opens the door to let her in. She glances at Frank. He smiles at her warmly. INT CAR DAY 47 David climbs in his side and starts the engine. DAVID Frank, this is Setsuko. Setsuko this is Frank. Setsuko smiles, despite herself.

FRANK How do you do. David glances at her, she at him. She turns around and shakes Frank's proffered hand. She and Rory exchange a look. Rory grins.

FRANK (CONT'D) What a surprise. EXT NAECAMURA'S GARDEN DAY 48 The Nakamuras have set lunch out on a table under a pergola in the back yard of their suburban brick house. The whole back yard is a vegetable garden, beautifully kept. Setsuko surveys the food, a dozen dishes, Indonesian style. She sips her wine. She watches Frank help Mr Nakamura with a small fire in an earthen barbeque. Mr Nakamura grills some whole fish. He looks up at Setsuko. MR NAKAMURA You so like your grandmother.

(CONTINUED) 48 CONTINUED:

Setsuko scowls, Rory grins at her from his chair in the shade. He sips his wine. She looks up to see Frank staring at her, as if seeing her for the first time, FRANK (to MR NAKAMUa) Who is her grandmother? Mr Nakamura looks at him, sees his confusion.

MR NAKAMURA The beautiful Hanako Frank. Who you so in love with, Frank continues to stare at Setsuko.

Mfi NARAMURA (CONT'D) We all know your secret. David comes out carrying a big bowl of rice. He looks at Setsuko. She looks at him. DAVID Smile. She looks away, refusing to smile. She is miserable, David looks up at Frank. DAVID (CONT'D) What secret's that dad? Frank looks at Mr Nakamura who is grinning at him. He looks back at Setsuko, He is confused and a little afraid. He looks at David's slightly sinister smile. DAI and JAN appear at the side of the house with drinks and a platter of sushi, Jan goes straight up to Frank. MR NAKAMURA You nearly late for fish! JAN We never miss your fish Henry. We follow the beautiful smell all the way from home. I'm so sorry Frank. What a shocking thing to happen. I was so sad when I heard. I was looking forward to meeting him. Frank stares at her. He has no idea what she's talking about. Dai calls her. He is standing next to Setsuko stealing glances at her. He finds her beautiful.

(CONTINUED) BAT Jan? She swings around and makes a beeline to Setsuko.

Jm You're the daughter1 Jan take Setsuko by the hand. She is an effusive, rather ovemhelming woman who talks too much and too loudly, DAVID Setsuko, This is Jan who wro-be the book I gave you, SETSUKO S haven" rred it, JAN That's all right. The sxam's not 'til next week. How horrible for you. SETSUKO Pardon me? JAB To lose your father. DAVID She never knew him. That'a why she's here. She needs your help, Setsuko refuses to look at him. DAS Jan can tell you the whale story can't you Jan? Setsuko picks up that there is a certain tension between IDai and Jan, a certain resentfulness on Dai's part,

M3.S NMMURA emerges carrying another dish, MRS N URA Why you not eating?! DAI You didn't cook enough mum. MBS Urn I have to try hard,

(CONTINUED) 48 CONTINUED: (3)

Mrs Nakamura smiles at Setsuko, URA (CONT'D) Today is for Hanako. My best cooking teacher. Setsuko 1-ooks at her, sensing a certain sadness. Mr Nakamura brings the fish on a platter and places it on the table,

And this for your father. My old school chum, He puts an arm around Setsuko and hugs her to him, his eyes suddenly filling with tears, She looks at David. He is watching Frank who is still standing next to the barbeque drink in hand, looking lost, DAVID C'mon dad, Time to confess. Frank looks stricken. RORY Leave him alone. DAVID No. I want to hear what he and Hanako got up to. Frank puts down his drink and walks straight past everyone, disappearing into the house, Rory looks at David accusingly and follows his grandfather. Mrs Nakmura takes care of Setsuko, showing her where to sit. MRS NAKaMURa You come sit next to me, Setsuko does as she's told. David sits opposite her. Dai and Jan and Mr Nakamura take their seats and start to load up their plates with food, MRS N URA (CONT'D) Why you take so long to get here? She takes Setsuko by the hand. MRS NIYKMURA (CONT'D) We never hear a word until your father show upt

(CONTINUED) 48 CONTINUED: ( 4 )

m N We know your father. We know your grandfather. DAI He used to beat mum up for not bowing to the Emperor in school. Setsuko watches David. He is aware of Frank and Rory's absence.

MRS N URA I was a very bad girl. Speak Indonesian in class. JAN (PATROMISING) You were a very good girl. It was the Emperor who was bad, David gets up and goes into the house.

49 RA'S BEDROOM DAY 49 Frank and Rory are standing in the Nakamura's bedroom staring at a wall full of family photographs and Japanese souvenirs. Rory peers closely at a photograph of young Frank in his guard's uniform at Rushworth, posing with his amaround the shoulders of the young Goh, They are both grinning, RORY Daggy unif om. But you were a bit of a dish, Frank is struck by his choice of words. He looks at Rory closely, at his sweet features, his rosy cheeks, his perfect skin* Rory looks at him and smiles cheekily. Frank takes his head in his hands and kisses him tenderly on the forehead, David appears in the doorway, Frank looks up at him, almost guilty. DAVID What's going on? Prank looks suddenly panic-stricken.

Maddie musn't know, DAVID Musn't know what?

(CONTINUED) 49 CONTINUED:

FRANK It'd be the end of everything. DAVID What are you talking about? Frank searches David's face, FRANK Don't tell your mother, DAVID I won't, Frank looks around the room, trying to discover where he might be.

DAVID (CONT ' D) Did you try to kiss her? Frank looks at him, confused. David is eager- He can smell blood. DAVID (CONT'D) Is that what you don't want mum to know? FRANK I was sick. He turns back to the photographs and searches them for some clue, then looks at the window where the light is filtering through them, making a pattern on the wall.

50 INT RUSHWORTH HOSPITAL WARD EVENING 50 A FLASHBACK. The young Frank, in his pyjamas, looking pale and ill stands at the curtained window of his ward in the filtered light. He watches the guard on the veranda outside fall asleep in his chair. Frank sneaks out of his ward and around to the children's ward where he sees Hanako sitting beside Goh's bed. She watches Goh sleeping. At the sight of the matron, the YOUNG EDNA crossing the yard towards the showers, Frank freezes. A few feet away Hanako emerges from the ward. She pauses down the veranda. She sees Frank lurking in the shadows.

(CONTINUED) 50 CONTINUED:

HANAKO Frank? Frank comes out into the light, looking guilty.

He holds out a book. She takes it.

YOUNG FRANK He's already finished the last one.

Hanako looks lovingly at him. He smiles shyly.

HANAKO You're very kind to us,

Frank shrugs, He glances in at Goh asleep.

INT NAWlMURA's BEDROOM DAY David looks into Frank's unhappy face. FRANK There was no cure for it.

DAVID Is that why you left the camp?

FRANK They sent me away. To a desk job.

( BEAT ) I never saw them again. Frank glances at Rory, who gives him a smile. David watches him leave the room. David and Rory look at the photographs together.

David finds one of Hanako in the kitchens with the YOUNG MRS NAKAMURA. Hanako is smiling into the camera, looking very like Setsuko.

DAVID I reckon she was the other woman, Mum always said there was another woman. How well would that have gone down with daddy if Frank was bonking one of the Japs right under his nose,

RORY Why can't you just leave it alone?

(CONTINUED) 5Q CONTINUED: (2)

David looks at him, Rory stares back. RORY (CONT'D) Move on dad, DAVID Fuck you Rory shakes his head and walks out of the room. David is Left to look at the photographs alone.

51 INT/EXT CAR DAY 5 1 Frank sits in the back of the car behind David, Rory next to him, Rory is playing a game on his new mobi.le phone. They are outside the Nakmuras. David watches Setsuko bowing to the old couple, saying goodbye in Japanese, DAVID (to RORY) Where d'you get that? RQRY Martin. DAVID Trying to buy you David stares ahead angrily, 52 EXT DRIVEWAY DAY Jan embraces an uncomfortable Setsuka. JAN Come and see Dai and me before you go. SETSUKO Z don't know bow much time X've gat, Setsuko shakes Dai's hand. DAX You know whsre we are. They look at each other. Dai is red in the face with drink, and a bit lovestruck. DAI (CONT'D) We Rushworth babies have to stick together,

(CONTINUE D) CONTINUED:

He lets go of her hand reluctantly. Setsuko climbs into the car. She waves as David pulls away. The Nakamuras wave back.

INT/EXT CAR DAY 53

David drives in silence. He turns the radio on low. He glances at Rory still playing with his phone.

DAVID Who pays the bill?

RORY Martin. David scowls.

RORY (CONT'D) J wash his car. And give h.im fashion advice. He's stylistically challenged, David shakes his head, puzzled.

RORY (CONT'D) Can you turn that up? David turns up the radio.

What a wicked thing to do, To make me &em of you. Oh 1-1-1 don't want to fall in iiove.., with you* No 1-1-1don't want to faLL in Love,,, with you. They all listen in silence as the dreamy song fills the air. Setsuko stares out the window.

DAY 54 David pulls up outside Frank's house. He gets out of the car and comes around to let Frank out. Rory gets out too, Frank looks at Setsuko.

Will I see you again?

(CONTINUED) 54 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO NO.

Give my best wishes to your father. I'm looking forward to meeting him, He and I were great mates. Rory takes Frank by the arm, He smiles at Setsuko. She smiles back. SETSUKO 1 will, She holds out her hand to Rory.

SETSUKQ (CONT'D) So long Rary. It was nice meeting you. Rory takes her hand and plants a kiss on it with a flourish.

RORY Ciao. David climbs back into the driver's seat

As they drive off. Frank waves to Setsuko, It is a very touching sight. Setsuko waves back.

55 INT CAR DAY 55

David pulls out of Frank's road. SETSUKQ Great kid, What are you going to do with him?

DAVID What do you mean? SETSUKO He's so.,. David glances at her, nervous of what she is about to say. SETSUKO (CONT'D) ,. ,unusual. DAVID In what way? 55 CONTINUED:

Setsuko looks at him. SETSUKO You don't think so? DAVID I'm doing everything I can to make him just a normal kid. SETSUKO I didn't mean anything bad. DAVID His mother's getting married. Setsuko watches the road ahead.

DAVID (CONT ' D) What can I do? He pauses. DAVID (CONT'D) Short of killing the dickhead she's marrying. Slowly, She smiles. He smiles sad.ly. 56 EXT HOTEL DAY 56 David pulls the car into a parking space outside Setsuko's hotel * 57 INT CAR DAY 57 David cuts the engine. Setsuko makes a move to get out. DAVID Thanks. SETSUKO What for? Setsuko is still. They sit in tense silence for a moment. DAVID What are you doing tomorrow? SETSUKO I'm going to Melbourne.

(CONTINUED) 57 CONTINUED:

DAVID Got a ticket? SETSUKO No * DAVID Anzac Day. You won't get a seat. SETSUKO There's always one seat. DAVID I'm taking Rory down to the coast to see my mother. Setsuko stares in the hotel windows at the JAPANESE TOURISTS inside. DAVID (CONT'D) Her father was the commandant at Rushworth. That's how she met Frank. Setsuko says nothing.

DAVID (CONT ' D) She's got all his letters. He wrote to her every week. He wasn't allowed to say much but they give you an idea what it was like. He writes well. She sent him books. They fell in love via the post. That way they didn't have to touch. Setsuko shakes her head. DAVID (CONT'D) Frank's not coming if that's what you're afraid of. Setsuko stares out the window. DAVID (CONT'D) Melbourne'll be closed. It's a public holiday. SETSUKO Frank's a very nice man. You're a very nice man. But I... He waits for her to finish.

(CONTINUED) 57 CONTINUED: (2)

DAVID Frank is not what he seems. SETSUKO I'm sorry. My life is not simple... Thank you for all your help. She opens the car door and climbs out. She closes it and walks away, David watches her disappear into the hotel. DAVID Fuck. 58 INT HOTEL ROQH NIGHT 58 Setsuko sits up at the table in her hotel room, It is late. She looks through her father's letters and photographs again, She smokes, She re-reads Frank's letter to Goh,

...She was a very brave woman to wtxom a terrible wrong was done. She throws the letter back onto the table.

David sits on the verandah smoking a cigarette, staring out into the night, The phone starts to ring. He gets up and goes inside to answer it. Inside he picks up the phone, Next to the phone on a white board is written in big letters, Id~d&y;Davdd and R~ryge ta vdgiak Had&&. Ph: $333 6869. DAVID Hello. Rory's bedroom door is ajar, David glimpses Rory arjleep on the bad naked except for his boxer shorts. DAVID (CONT'D) Hello? SETSURO(V.0,) Can I come to your mother's? Rory stirs in his sleep. His bedclothes fall to the floor. DAVID No problem.

(CONTINUED) 58 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO (V.O.) Thanks. There is a pause. SETSUKO (V.O.) (CONT'D) Goodnight. DAVID Goodnight. INT SETSUKO's HOTEL NIGHT Setsuko stands by the mirror. She can see a reflection of Goh's suitcase standing in the corner, 59 INT RORY'S BEDROOM NIGHT 59 David stands by Rory's bed looking at the boy's sweet face. He has replaced the bedclothes. Rory sleeps like a baby. David pulls the sheet up over his bare shoulder, 60 K'S LIVING ROOM MOWING 60 Frank stands at Rory's door. Rory has gone. Frank looks puzzled. He passes the phone on his way to check David's room. He knocks on the door. There is no answer. He peers inside, David has gone. He goes to the phone and picks it up. Then he sees the message with Maddie's number. He puts the phone down. He goes into the kitchen and sees the breakfast things in the sink. He stares out into the garden. He starts to wash the dishes. 61 EXT CITY STREET DAY 61 Anzac Day marchers gather in town in readiness for the parade, men of Frank's generation, wearing chests full of medals, and sombre faces. Families already line the parade route, kids in front waving Australian flags. 62 INT/EXT CAR DAY 62 David negotiates the city streets. He drives under a street banner that reads REmMBER WZAC DAY - LEST WE FORGET. He has to sl.ow down to let a bunch of veterans cross in front of the car. Rory is in the back of the car playing with his phone.

(CONTINUED) 62 CONTINUED:

Setsuko sits next to David looking out at the men as they brush past her window. One OLD IvlAN glares at her malevolently, Setsuko stares back at him, then he is lost in the crowd. David speeds up * SETSUKO Frank doesn't march?

DAVID Not for years. All the other guards are dead. They were all old fellas,

63 K'S LIVING ROOM DAY 63

Frank is watching the preparations for the parade on television.

TV MNOUNCER Brisbanites are turning out in their thousands today for the annual Anzac Day parade. Police are expecting a record crowd,,. He pours himself another finger of whisky and drinks it down.

64 EXT BEACH DAY 64 Setsuko is standing on a rise with the Gold Coast stretched out behind her. She smiles into the camera, her arm around Rory's shoulder. David sees her image floating in the camera lens,

DAVID %at do I do? SETSUKO Just press,

He takes the picture. Me looks up, gazing at Setsuko, She returns hia gaze, Rory comes and takes the camera from David. RORY Let the expert do it, David goes to stand next to Setsuko,

RORY ( CONT ' D ) You look like newly weds. Move closer dad.

(CONTINUED) 64 CONTINUED:

David steps closer. Setsuko steps further away.

RORY ( CONT ' D ) Cheezels ! Rory takes the picture. 65 INT MADDIE'S APmTMENT DAY 65 David's mother MADDIE, Setsuko, Rory and David are sitting around the dining table at the end of lunch. An awkward silence. Setsuko looks around the room, It is comfortably furnished with family heirlooms. Every surface is covered with framed photographs and memorabilia, a rich clutter. The bookshelves are well stocked with literary fiction, biographies, history. She looks at Maddie, who is handsome, white haired, almost severe. David pours his mother more wine. Rory holds out his glass for more. David pours him another drink. MADDIE Your great grandfather always said you must learn to drink young and never get drunk. He was a Scot so he knew what he was talking about. She pauses. MADDIE (CONT'D) Frank was the son he'd never had. I was the bait. SETSUKO Was your father at Rushworth for long? WDIE Three years. All the time Frank was there. She looks at Setsuko. MADDIE (CONT'D) David says you want to read Prank's letters for your book. They mention your grandmother quite a bit. She gets up and goes to the next room. David and Setsuko exchange a glance. Rory pours the last drops of wine into his empty glass.

(CONTINUED) Maddie returns with a shoebox, She opens it on the table and David takes out his father's wartime letters, being careful to wipe his hands first. He hands them one by one to Setsuko.

MADDIE (CONT'D) They're full of lies, I don't know why I've kept them. You can give them back to Frank if you like.

Setsuko handles the letters carefully. She opens one, She sees the censor's work, thick black lines obliterating whole lines and occasional words.

MADDIE (CONT'D) How's he getting on?

DAVID (JOKING) Who? Who are you?

Rory laughs.

RORY Like he forgets what you've just told him. Then he remembers something that happened a hundred years ago.

MADDIE He should be in a home. You've got your own life to live.

DAVID Somebody's got to get him there.

MADDIE It's ridiculous you giving up your job.

DAVID I needed a break.

He glances at Setsuko. She looks up at him.

Maddie looks at the letters on the table. Then at Setsuko.

MADDIE Something happened to him, well the war. The war happened to all of us. And we were never the same people.

David looks at her. She turns to him.

(CONTINUED) 65 CONTINUED: (2)

M;4DDSE (CONT'D) Your father didn't love me, He married me because S was there, ROIIY Did you love him? MaBDIE I was lonely, T'd lost all the boys I'd ever cared about. She looks at David. MADDIE (CONT'D) (FIERCELY) If there's ever another war take this one as far away as you can. Don't let them get their hands on him, RORY What if I want them to get their hands on me? Re grins stupidly at Maddie, DAVID Rory. Just don't, RORY I think the army'd be kind fun. Marty was in the army. Air force. Something, David glares at him. Rory glares back,

RORY ( CQNT ' D ) Can we go to the beach before, like, tomorrow? Me gets up and starts clearing the dishes, Naddie looks at Setsuko, mDDSE My father always spoke highly of the Japanese internees. Elle found them very well-disciplined, amongst themselves. The only complaint he had was that they had too many babies. He had to speak to them about the babies. SETSUKO Did it work?

(CONTINUED) 65 CONTINUED : ( 3 )

MADDIE No. DAVID Should have starved them. Made them build a railway or something. mDIE A lot of people said that afterwards, To Frank. When the POWs were coming back. There is an awkward pause. MADDIE (CONT'D) What is your book about? SETSUKO I'm not writing a book. She glances at David. NADDIE Oh, David said you were. SETSUKO No. MADDIE Then why are you here? Maddie looks at her, SETSUKO re* * DAVID She's digging up the past, MADDIE And what have you found? Setsuko looks down at the letters again, unable to answer. DAVID (TO MADDIE) Who do you reckon the other woman was? MADDIE What?

( CONTINUE D ) 65 CONTINUED: (4)

DAVID Dad had someone else. You always said

SO I MADDIE I don't remember saying that. DAVID You said he was cold to you. Physically. So there must have been someone else, She stares at David. DAVID (CONT'D) I reckon it was Hanako. Maddie looks at him in disbelief. DAVID (CONT'D) She's in every letter. How beautiful she was. Row smart. How cruel her husband was. How sorry Fran.kwas for Goh. WDDIE She was Japanese. DAVID She was there. He looks to Setsuko for support. She looks away. DAVID (CONT'D) He was nineteen yeam old, Only a few years older than Rory* Rory stands in the doorway. RORY Z think you need help dad. David stares at Setsuko. DAVID What do you think? Setsuko says nothing. MADDIE My father would have know,

(CONTINUED ) 65 CONTINUED: (5)

DAVID Maybe he did. Maddie looks at him then at the pile of letters on the table. She looks up at Setsuko. MADDIE What does Frank say? SETSURO I don't think he remembers. DAVID He remembers. RORY Can we, like, go now? Maddie looks at David. David shrugs a bit smugly, as if it's all blindingly obvious. 66 EXT BEACH DAY 66 David is playing beach cricket with Rory. He bowls. Rory takes a wild swing and misses and then giggles too much. DAVID You play like a girl! RORY You'd know, He goes after the ball then takes the crease again trying to play like a boy. Setsuko and Maddie approach, on the return leg of a walk along the sand. They watch the game as they come nearer. MADDIE You must have married young. SETSUKO I wanted to stay in America. They sit down facing the sea. MADDIE What do you translate?

(CONTINUED) 66 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO Fiction. MADDIE I imagine that's very hard, SETSUKO Good fiction is hard, MADDIE Of course. You must believe every word or the whole lie is exposed. Rory splashes into the water, deliberately falling, rolling in the waves like a little boy. MADDIE (CONT'D) Is that what you're here for? To expose Frank's lie? David crashes into the surf. MADDIE (CONT'D) Whenever I asked Frank if he loved me he said he didn't know what I meant. Setsuko watches David in the sea. MADDIE (CONT'D) Which was true. He didn't. INT MADDIE'S UNIT DAY 67 In Maddie's empty unit overlooking the beach the phone rings and rings. Maddie's voicemail answers. MADDIE(V.0.) Hello. You've reached Maddie Chambers. I am unavailable at the moment so please leave a message and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. There is a beep then a pause, then Frank's voice on the other end, thick with whisky. FRANK (V.O.) David?... Where are you? INT FWKS' WLWAY DAY Frank is sitting by the phone, a drink in his hand.

(CONTINUED) 68 CONTINUED:

FRANK When are you coming to do the garden? I thought it was today,,.

He stares at the whisky bottle. It is good Scotch. For a moment a flash of memory comes to him.

69 PNT GOH'S HOTEL ROOM DAY 69

A FLASHBACK, Frank's hands around a bottle of the same whisky. He pours some into a glass. His hand is shaking as he raises the glass and drinks quickly. He puts the glass down and turns to look at something behind him in the room, something that fills him with fear and dread* His red bow tie is askew. His hair is mussed up.

70 INT FRANK'S HaLWAY BAY 70 Frank breathes down the phone.

He puts the phone down.

He gets up and comes down the hallway. He puts his hand on the daorhandle and opens it. Me walks through. The door closing behind him makes a sickening thud.

7 J. EXT CITY STmET DAY 71 Frank gets off a bus in the centre of town. He is lost. The streets are full of people, drifting away now that the parade has passed. Frank wanders after a bunch of OLD SOLDZERS. They turn into a pub. Frank follows, The pub is crowded and noisy, Frank gets himself a beer and finds a seat. Next to him is a table full of UNIFO watches their faces as they talk. Some smile and are quite animated but one sits with a terribly haunted expression on his face, Frank catches his eye. They stare at each other for a moment.

Frank looks away. He takes a long drink, draining his glass,

72 EXT STREET BAY 72 Frank, swaying, wanders along a crowded footpath, against the flow. He bumps up against an upright and sober OLD SOLDIER in W2uniform coming the other way,

Fuck off l

( CONTINUED ) 72 CONTINUED:

The old soldier steps out of his way. FRANK (CONT'D) Watch where you're fuckin' going. Others in the crowd back off to avoid trouble. Frank swings at the old soldier and misses. Frank staggers back and falls heavily, hitting his head. No one helps. He crawls to a bench and pulls himself up onto it to lie down for a while. He is bleeding from the temple. The old soldier bends over him. Frank pushes him away.

Go fuck yourself. He leaves Frank reluctantly and marches off, CHILDREN pass by at Frank's eye level. A BOY'S face is the last thing Frank sees before he passes out. 73 IN% BRSSBANE HOSPITAL WARD NIGHT 73 David sits by Frank's bed watching him sleep. Frank has a dressing on his temple and a drip in his arm. Be looks up to see a doctor standing at the door, motioning to him, an Indian psychiatrist, DR SINGH, bearing a name tag. David gets up and goes out into the corridor to speak to him. They find somewhere to sit. No one is about. DAVID Thank you. DR SINGH You're welcome, David shakes his head, ashamed. DAVID I shouldn't have left him. He looks up at Dr Singh, DR SINGH Does your father often drink too much? DAVID No. I've never seen him drunk.

(CONTINUED) 73 CONTINUED:

DR SINGH Bas he been under any kind of pressure? David looks at Dr singh's tie. It is very loud. DAVID (SOFTLY) He's losing his house. DR SINGH Pardon. David looks at him. DAVID His memory's going. It upsets him. DR SINGH Losing one's memory can be a blessing. DAVID 1s it treatable? DR SINGH 1n some patients it can be slowed down. In others it is temiaal. DAVID They die? DR SINGH Effectively. They are not the people they were. DAVID Who are they? DR SINGH The Queen of England or Jesus. Whoever they like. Perhaps I am not really Dr Singh. Be grins at David, a bit creepily. DR SINGH (CONT'D) Really the best thing is to enter their world, Do not judge them, Just try to keep them happy in the moment.

(CONTINUED) 73 CONTINUED: ( 2 )

David takes out a cigarette. Dr Singh waves a finger at him. David puts the cigarettes away. DR SINGH (CONT'D) I have put him on medication for his anxiety. DAVID Than.ks. DR SINGH You will have to remind him to take it. Dr Singh gets up and hands over a box of pills, David reads the label, DAVID What if he forgets? DR SINGH Make sure he doesn't. David puts the pills in his pocket. Dr Singh puts a hand on David's shoulder. DR SINGH (CONT'D) It's quick or very slow. But either way we lose them. Dr Singh walks away down the corridor. David's eyes fill with tears. INT FRANK'S KITCHEN NIGHT 74 It is late. David closes the front door quietly. The kitchen light is on. On the kitchen table is a bowl of steamed rice covered in wrap. He goes to the stove and looks under the lid of the frypan there, Setsuko has made dinner for Rory and left some for David. SETSUKO(O/S) Is he okay? David turns around. Setsuko is leaning in the doorway with a glass of beer in her hand and a cigarette. DAVID Yeah. He'll be out in a day. Rory okay?

(CONTINUED) 74 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO Gone to bed. DAVID Thanks. Setsuko puts the rice in the microwave and heats up the stir fried meat and vegetables in the frypan. SETSUKO We cleaned out the fridge. Setsuko takes out the rice and arranges the meat dish next to it. David watches her. She works quickly, efficiently. The food looks good. It is a long time since anyone looked after him. Setsuko glances at him. SETSUKO (CONT'D) I gather you don't cook? He shakes his head. He washes his face at the sink then goes to the fridge and gets a beer. There is almost nothing else in there. He passes one to Setsuko. He drinks from the can. She sits down at the table and refills her glass. She takes a long drink. David takes the food she has prepared and sits down opposite her. She watches him eat. DAVID Very good. She raises her glass in a toast to herself. He sees that she has been drinking steadily all night, He raises his can and drinks. Frank's letters are in a pile in front of Setsuko. She picks one up and starts to read, SETSUKO My dear Maddie, Sorry I haven't written. Have been down with a fever again which has knocked me for six as usual but am recovered now and back on my feet, if a bit feeble... INT BRISBANE HOSPITAL WARD NIGHT 75 Frank lies in his bed asleep but restless, his eyes travelling wildly under his eyelids.

(CONTINUED) 75 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO (Ve 0. ) The hospital provides it's own musernents. Goh was in with the chickenpox. He is always a lively companion.,,

76 EXT RUSWORTB BOSPfTaL VE 76 The young Frank, in his pyjamas, bowls a ball made out of newspaper at the young Goh who whacks it with a rolled up newspaper bat. SETSUKO(V,O,) He stops me feeling sorry for myself. 77 EXT RUSWORTH COWOUND DAY 77 The young Frank, back in uniform, strides across the exercise yard towards young Goh who is sitting on the steps of a an army hut, one of a row that make up Compound B. Frank is surrounded by a dozen CHILDREN, all laughing with their hands held out for lollies, Pranks feels in his pockets and pretends they're empty, finally digging very deep and producing a handful of sweets, which ho distributes. Under his arm he carries a couple of books. SETSUKO (V.O.) I've struck up a bit sf a friendship with his mother who has expressed an interest in improving her English and perhaps teaching Goh and a few of the children who are not so keen on the Jap school. Prank comes up the steps of the hut to where Coh is sitting and produces a chocolate bar from his top pocket, which he hands to Gob. Goh thrusts it in his pocket before anyone else sees. Frank smiles at him. This is a secret exchange between the two of them. He puts his hand on Goh's shoulder as he goes inside, SETSUKO(V,O.) (CONT'D) She can read Japanese but feels there will be little use for it after the war. As there is nothing in the way of a library here X am lending her the use of the book$ you've sent.., The husband disapprove^ of course so we have to be a bit clever,.. Frank enters the hut and shuts the door behind him. At that moment a WOMAN pushing a makeshift stroller passes and looks meaningfully at Goh. Goh glares back at her,

(CONTINUED) 77 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO(V.0.) (CONT'D) Happily, she is making very rapid progress. For many in here it is the idleness that is hardest to bear and the lack of anything resembling poetry or beauty. 78 EMT RUSHWORTH HUT DAY 78 A book of poetry is open on Hanako's lap. Her hand rests on the page. Frank's hand rests on his knee. Hanako puts her hand over his then brings it up to her cheek, SETSUKO(V,O.) That and the uncertainty of not knowing when they are to be allowed to go home, if at all. Regular rumours spread through the camp that they are all to be shot and it is not possible to completely eliminate their fear on that score, as we can't be sure ourselves whether or not it is true. Hanako takes Frank's trembling hand, kisses it, then places it on her breast. SETSUKO (CONT'D) We are very lucky the Saps are not more trouble ... 79 INT RUSHWORTH SCHOOLHOUSE DAY 79 The handmade desks have been pushed back against the walls. A portrait of the Emperor hangs at the front, below that a hand sewn Japanese flag. In the middle of the floor Bideo Maeda practices an aikido drill with fierce concentration, SETSUKO(V.0.) ...but their culture would seem to dictate a level of self-discipline one can only admire. I long for your letters, Your Yank friends sound like a lot of fun. Maeda finishes and bows deeply to the Emperor's portrait, 80 INT RUSHWORTH HUT DAY Hanako kisses Frank. Very gently he gushes her away. 8 1 EXT RUSHWORTH HUT DAY 81 In the distance Maeda emerges from the schoolhouse, Goh sees him immediately and knocks on the hut door in a rhythm, three quick, two slow, three quick, two SLOW. SETSUXO(V.0,) But 1 can understand your disgust with their swagger when our fellows are having such a hellish time of it. The next instant Frank is at the door and down the steps. Goh watches his father pass Frank half way across the yard. They exchange a bow by way of a. greeting.

SETSUKO (V,O,) (GONT'D) Let me know how you are when you are sober enough to put pen to paper.

82 EXT RUSIIWORTH COMPQUNDDAY 82 Frank walks towards the Compound gates, the expression on his handsome young face a pained mix of confusion and fear. SETSUKO(V,O,) All my love, as ever, Frank.

83 ENT BRISBWE HOSPITAL WARD NXCHT Frank opens his eyes with a tiny cry sf fright. 84 K'S KITCEEN NIGHT 84 Setsuko looks up from the letter. David has stopped eating and is looking at her, wanting her. Setsuko looks away. She gets up and takes his plate to the sink. David gets up and comes to her. He puts his arms around hen waist. She takes his hand and puts it on her breast, David kisses her neck,

85 ENT BEDROOM MORNING 85 David wakes up alone,

There is a note on the pillow beside him. He picks it up and reads,

(CONTINUED) 85 CONTINUED :

David looks up. Rory is standing in the doorway in his boxer short8. RORY There's no food in the house.

DAVID Put some clothes on.

RORU I'm so hungry. David lies back, barely awake. DAVSD Just give me a minute, We'll go out, Rory disappears muttering. David re-reads the note.

86 INT SETSUKO'S MOTEL LOBBY MORNING 86

Setsuko is packed and ready to leave. She is standing at the reception desk talking to a clerk.

SETSUKO Were there any messages for me? Anything from the States? The clerk checks. CLERK No, Nothing, Setsuko looks upset. SETSUKO J need a cab to the airport please.

He motions towards the front door where a couple of taxis are lined up. Setsuko glances around and seas David and Rory coming through the front doors. She turns away hoping they haven't seen her* The clerk completes her papemork and hands her credit card back. CLEM Where are you off to taday?

(CONTINUED) 86 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO Melbourne. CLERK Business or pleasure? SETSUXO Neither. CLERK Melbourne's my favourite town. A SECOND CLERK appears beside the first. CLERK#2 Can I help you sir? Setsuko looks around. David is standing beside her with Rory. They ignore the clerk. Setsuko picks up her bags and starts walking towards the front doors. David and Rory go with her, David looking dishevelled and desperate. DAVID When are you coming back? She doesn't answer. DAVID (CONT'D) What do I tell Frank? Setsuko stops walking and looks at him pleadingly. DAVID (CONT'D) We could go together. RORY I'll come! Setsuko starts walking again. SETSUKO There's no point. She walks out the doors. David and Rory follow. 87 EXT SETSUKO'S HOTEL MORNING 87 She goes to the first taxi in line. David helps Setsuko to load her luggage onto the back seat. She gives Rory a hug.

(CONTINUED) CONTINUED :

She shakes David's hand. He doesn't want to let go of her, She withdraws her hand. David stands helplessly by as Setsuko climbs into the taxi and shuts the door. The driver pulls away. Rory and David wave, David looking utterly abandoned. RORY Can we have breakfast now? I'm starving.

INT AIRPORT MORNING 88 Setsuko stands at a public phone at the airport with Edna's letter in her hand. She dials Edna's number. SETSUKO Hello? Mrs Watson... I'm sorry... My name is Setsuko Forrester. Goh Maeda was my father. INT EDNA'S HALLWAY MORNING Edna sits holding the phone.

SETSUKO(V. 0. ) I'm afraid he died suddenly... He had a letter from you.., EDNA That's right. SETSUKO(V.0.) I was wondering if I could come by,.. EDNA I was hoping to see him. SETSUKO (V.O.) My father can't come. He died. EDNA Oh, I am sorry. SETSUKO (V.O.) But I would like to call by ...if that's okay. 90 INT AIRPORT MORNING SETSUKO Later today,,. I only have today,

EDNA(V,O.) Of course dear. You must come, Setsuko looks relieved. SETSUKO Thank you.

91 INT PLANE DAY 91

Setsuko is in her seat reading Jan's book, The Rushworth Story. She looks at a picture of the main gates of the camp, at a map of the compounds with the Italian, German and Japanese areas marked out,

92 EXT mLBOURNE AIRPORT DAY 92 Setsuko finds her hire car in the parking lot and throws her luggage in the back.

93 TNT CAFE DAY 93 Setsuko drives along the highway with the roadmap open on the seat beside her. She peers at the upcoming exit sign, It reads Bendigo. She takes the exit. Goh's notebook is open on the seat, Setsuko has circled the name EDNA WATSON and the address with a highlighter,

94 TNT BRLSBANE HOSPITAL WARD DAY 94 David sits with Frank in the chairs by the window.

Rory is sitting on the bed with the television on, eating doughnuts and drinking chocolate milk.

DAVID Did Edna ever catch you at it? Frank looks at him, confused. Rory glances at his father.

RORY That's disgusting.

(CONTINUED) 94 CONTINUE D :

DAVID She probably thought so too. FRANK Edna was an ignorant bitch, She knew nothing. Rory raises his eyebrows to his father,

95 EXT EDNA'S STREET DAY 95 Setsuko pulls up outside Edna's house.

96 EXT/XNT EDNA'S HALLWAYDAY 96 Edna appears at the door. She stares at Setsuko, The resemblance to Hanako is shocking. Setsuko smiles and extends her hand and Edna hesitates before taking it.

SETSUKO I'm Setsuko. Edna takes her hand and grips it fiercely.

EDNA I would have recognised you anywhere. You must come in. I've made you some lunch. She puts her ams around Setsuko and holds her tight, her eyes brimming with tears,

EDNA (CONT'D) You've come such a long way.

97 INT EDNA'S LIVING ROOMDAY The table is strewn with old photographs and letters. Edna picks up a photograph of the young Frank in uniform.

EDNA He was so much younger than the other men. So full of fun. Setsuko looks at Frank's handsome young face.

EDNA (CONT'D) And she was much younger than her husband.

(CONTINUED) 97 CONTINUED:

Edna passes her a photograph of Manako and Goh standing on the hospital veranda. EDNA (CONTtD) It was the boy I felt sorry for. He didn't know if he was Arthur or Martha. Setsuko looks up at her,

EDNA (CONTtD) Me was a pawn in their game, Edna takes a gulp of tea. EDNA (CQNT'DJ I did what I did for his sake. 98 INT RUSHWORTH CO DANT'S OFFICE DAY 98 The young Edna stands in front of the Commandant's desk. DANT looks up at her searchingly, not quite buying her story. CO DANT Can you tell me exactly what you saw? YOUNG EDNA I was going for my shower sir.

99 EXT RUSWWORTH HOSPITAL GROUNDS NIGHT 99 Young Edna is crossing the grounds with her towel and clean clothes over her am, She suddenly realises she's forgotten something and turns, YOUNG EDNA(Ve0e) I forgot my soap. X turned to go back and I saw them. She sees something move in the shadowy lights of the veranda and stops in her tracks, Jt is Frank, CO DANT(V.0.) Saw who? Edna hardly dares to breathe. She watches Frank hand Manako a book. Kanako speaks, then leans towards Frank and kisses him on the mouth, 100 INT RUSHWORTH COMMANDANT'S OFFICE DAY Edna is afraid to go on. COMMANDANT Who did you see? YOUNG EDNA Lieutenant Chambers sir. COMMANDANT In an embrace with Mrs Maeda. YOUNG EDNA They were kissing. The COMMANDANT glares at her. YOUNG EDNA (CONT'D) They are always talking and laughing together. The boy has spent a lot of time in the hospital, The way his mother carries on you'd think it was a holiday camp. . . 101 INT RUSHWORTH HOSPITAL MATRON'S OFFICE DAY 101 Young Edna is in her office smoking a cigarette. She watches through the open window as Frank, in his pyjamas and Hanako sit side by side with a book open in front of them, Hanako trying to recite from memory, stuffing it up and laughing. Goh recites the passage perfectly. YOUNG GOH The woods are lovely, dark, and deep But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Frank and Hanako applaud. Goh gives Frank a dazzling smile. Hanako puts a hand on Frank's arm. YOUNG EDNA(V.0.) It's disgusting. My brother Donald is dead because of them, Twenty one with a kiddy he'll never see. She stops to blow her nose, fighting back tears. INT RUSHWORTH COMMANDANT'S OFFICE DAY 102 Young Frank stands in front of the Commandant's desk, shaking in his boots. FRANK She has feelings for me sir. COMMANDANT What kind of feelings? Frank is afraid to go on. 103 INT RUSHWORTH HOSPITAL WARD DAY Young Edna is giving Frank a sponge bath.

FRANK(V.0. ) I have never given her any encouragement, They are alone in the ward. She takes a cloth, squeezes it dry and wipes Frank's upper body very gently. She takes great pleasure in the task, Frank can tell. She pauses to examine the scar on Frank's side, an ugly gash near his hip, which she pats tenderly with the cloth, making Frank wince. He glances at her, at the look of pure love on her face, She bends down and is about to kiss the wound when Frank grabs hold of her arm and pushes her violently away. She falls, sending her trolley crashing to the floor. 104 INT BRISBANE HOSPITAL WARD DAY 104 David looks at his father. DAVID If she was in love with you why did she dob you in? FRANK I was engaged to Maddie. DAVID So she wanted your future father-in- law to think you were bad news? Frank looks him in the eye. FMK None of it was true. He didn't believe a word of it,

(CONTINUED) INT RUSHWORTH CO DANT's OFFICE DAY Frank stands in front: of the desk as before, COrnDrnT Maddie doesn't need to hear about any of this. FRANK Thank you sir. CO DANT We'll miss you. The children in particular will miss you. FRANK is upset.

Would it be possible for me to stay until the dance sir? I know a lot of the men were looking forward to it. ( BEAT ) I'm organising the refreshments. CO DANT Of course. The Commandant gets up and comes to stand next to Frank,

Thank you very much sir, CO DWT It's a bloody shame Frank. You're such an asset. Me puts an am around Frank's shoulder. CO DANT (CONT'D) Sex raisas its ugly head eh, The Commandant gives him a cheery smile, Frank tries to smile but only succeeds in Looking completely miserable. 105 INT EDNA'S LIVING ROOM DAY 105 Edna looks out the window. The weather has turned grey and cold. EDNA I nursed until I retired at the age of sixty-eight,

( CONTINUED) 105 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO You never married? Edna looks at her. EDNA There was no one to marry me. She takes another sip of tea, EDNA (CONT'D) I felt sorry for your grandfather in the end. He was a decent fellow. He found out about Frank, Beat a confession out of her, then swallowed ground glass. That wasn't in the book. I didn't .tell half of what I know to that woman. SETSUKO Why not? EDNA None of her beeswax. She looks at Setsuko closely. EDNA (CONT'D) Your grandmother knew why he'd done it, 106 INT RUSHWORTH HOSPITAL DAY 106 Hanako, bruised from a beating, looks down at her husband's body. Goh stands beside her staring hard at his father's traumatised face in death. The body is lying on a slab in the hospital. Hanako looks up at young Edna standing on the other side of the slab. Edna gives her a faint smile. Hanako, devastxted, defeated, takes Goh by the hand. They turn and walk away. EDNA(V.0,) Then they were sent off to Japan. 107 INT EDNA'S LIVING ROOM DAY EDNA I don't know what became of them there. It must have been very hard. They'd never been to Japan most of thsm.

(CONTINUED) 107 CONTINUED:

Setsuko looks at her old, ravaged face.

EDNA ( CONT ' D) I didn't go very far away. I stayed close to home. Edna puts a hand over Hanako's and pats it, EDNA (CONT'D) Would you like to see it? SETSURO Yes, That's why I've come. 108 EXT FIELD DAY Setsuko's car drives along a dusty country road, It comes to the top of a rise and stops. Setsuko and Edna climb out, pulling their jackets around them against the cold. A savage wind has picked up and is whipping the dust around. They walk a few metres to the edge of the rise and look down at the empty flat in front of them. Nothing remains of the camp. Setsuko follows Edna down the hill. 109 EXT FLAT DAY 109 Their steps flatten the dry grass, They halt in the dust, Ahead of them is an old concrete slab, overgrown with weeds. EDNA That's where the store was. They go across and stand on the slab, Edna Looks around her, getting her bearings. EDNA (CONT'D) There was a double wire fence, barbed wire, Over there was the front gate and you walked through there and down between the fences that divided up the compounds. She sets off across the flat. Setsuko follows. Edna is pacing the whole place, seeing it in her head, sensing the distances between things, Setsuko follows her in silence, 110 EXT FLAT DAY 110 About a hundred metres on Edna stops and turns around on the spot, checking the lie of the land. EDNA This is where they lived. Compound B. There was a row of huts. This is where your father grew up. Setsuko stands beside her absorbing that knowledge. Edna points away to the left. EDNA (CONT'D) The hospital was outside the fence over there, The guard's quarters were over there. On the corners there were watchtowers manned with machine guns. They stand in silence trying to picture it. Eventually Edna speaks. EDNA (CONT'D) They took it a11 down after the war. Every last thing, You think they'd have left something to remember it by.

111 INT/EXT CAR AFTERNOON 111 Edna and Setsuko sit in the car, not quite ready to leave. EDNA Is Frank. well? Setsuko looks out the window at the empty flat below them. SETSUKO He's in hospital. EDNA Will you be seeing him again? Setsuko says nothing. EDNA (CONT'D) Would you tell him I'm sorry. Setsuko looks at her.

(CONTINUED) 111 CONTINUED :

EDNA (CONT'D) I don't expect him to forgive me. Just say Edna's sorry. Setsuko hesitates, Edna is close to tears. She stares out the window at the country. 112 EXT FIELD AFTERNOON 112 The car pulls away along the dirt road, throwing up a cloud of dust that twists and turns in the wind. 113 EXT FRANK'S HOUSE AFTERNOON 113 David pulls up outside Frank's house. He and Rory get out of the car. 114 1NT FRANK'S ROUSE AFTERNOON 114 They let themselves in and come through the house. There is a bad smell in the place and the floor is littered with papers and files. They follow their noses to Frank's study and find the rubbish bin in there full to overflowing with papers. Frank has emptied the bin in the middle of the floor and tried to stuff the whole contents of the study in instead. The place is a festering mess. DAVID Jesus. RORY Nice one grandad. David picks up plastic bags of rubbish Frank has removed from the bin to make room for his papers. They are leaking grease and putrid water. He rescues what he can from the bin then starts to shove the garbage back in as best he can. 115 INT MELBOURNE HOTEL NIGHT 115 Setsuko sits up in bed in her hotel room staring into her drink. She drains her glass. She picks up the phone beside her and dials her home number in the US, She waits. Her husband's voice answers the other end.

JIM(V,O. ) Hi. You've reached Jim, Ken and Setsuko Forrester. (MORE)

(CONTINUED) 115 CONTIWEB: JIM(V.O. ) (CONT'D) Sorry we're not able to take your call but we're busy folks with more important things to do! Leave us a message we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks. Setsuko waits for the beep then speaks. SETSUKO Jim. Would you pick up the phone if you're not too busy fucking Marilyn ... 116 INT THE FORRESTER'S LIVING ROOM DAY 116 JIM is indeed fucking ILYN, on the sofa. They are both fully clothed, It is a quick one while Ken is out. Jim looks up, horrified, the smile wiped well and truly from his face. We stares at the phone, dreading what is coming next. SETSUKO (V.0,) I 'rn in Melbourne. f 'm r&ally sorry you didn't ring me. It was a kind of a

Jim gets off Marilyn, They both sit up and listen, SETSUKO(V,O.) (CONT'D) I suppose I imagined you might think about me. Wonder how I was doing, you know? It's not every day your father dies in some place you never heard of. I had him cremated and just left him in the cemetery. Do you think that was the right thing to do? I'm not so sure...I wanted your Christian opinion. I think I'll go back and see if he's all right, Then I'll be coming home, We'll talk then I guess. The time on the message runs out, signalled by a loud beep. 117 INT MELBOURNE HOTEL ROOM NIGHT 117 XETSUKO aye. She puts the phone down. She looks inside her bag. She pulls out Jan's book. She gives it a shake and Jan's university business card falls out, She dials er written on the back. She waits.

(CONTINUED) 11'7 CONTINUED :

Dai answers the phone, DAI (V.0.) Hello. SETSUKO Dai? Hello. It's Setsuko Forrester, We met,.. INT DAI's LIVING ROOM NIGHT Dai stands in his living room, a spare, open architect designed Brisbane house. Dai is obviously excited by the sound of her voice. DAI Oh hi. SETSUKO(V.0.) Is it okay if I speak in Japanese? Do you speak Japanese? DAI (IN JAPANESE) Badly. Pause, DAI (CONT'D) (IN JAPANESE)Are you okay? 1NT MELBOURNE HOTEL ROOM NIGHT SETSUKO (IN JA2ANESE)I wondered if I could see you. I'll be back in Rrisbane tomorrow. Maybe I could call you. Dai imagines this is something like a come on. DAI(V.0.) (IN JAPANESE)Where are you? SETSUKO X went to Rushworth, INT DAI's LIVING ROOM NIGHT Jan watches Dai on the phone, curious. He looks at her, SETS'UKO(V,O.) (CONT'D) (IN JWANESE)Theretsnothing there.

(CONTINUED) 118 CONTINUED:

Pause. DAI (IN JAVMESE) Why don't you come and have dinner tomorrow night? about seven. Jan listens. SETSUKO (V.O.) Thank you. Arigato gozaimasu, DAI (IN JAPANESE) I'll look forward to it. The phone goes dead. He looks at Jan. DAX (CONT'D) Setsuko. She's coning to dinner tomorrow, JAN You could have asked me. Dai stares at her, DAI You can patronise her again, like you did at lunch. Jan bristles, Re walks away from her, She follows him. JAN what'^ that supposed to mean? We goes to the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water. Be keeps his back to her. She turns and leaves the room. Dai sips his water.

119 DAY 119 David opens the car door and lets Frank out, Rory gets out with Frank's overnight bag. They all go into the house. DAY 119 CONTINUED:

David, Rory and Frank sit having lunch on the veranda, slices of cheese on sliced bread, served in its wrapper and some apples, Rory has finished. He sits playing with his mobile phone. The dog sits at his feet. David drinks beer out of the can, two empties beside his plate. There are two pills lined up beside Frank's water. Frank stares at them. FRANK I don't want these, DAVID Take them. They make you a nicer person. FRANK They make me dozy. I'll take them at night. DAVID You'll forget. FRANK No I won't. David looks at Rory. DAVID Stop playing with that fucking phone. Rory keeps playing with the phone. RORY What's your problem? Chill. DAVID When was the last time you read a book? RORY I read books. He switches the phone off and looks at David. DAVID Show me. Rory hands the phone to David. David looks it over.

(CONTINUED) 119 CONTINUED: (2)

DAVID (CONT'D) How often do you wash his car? RORY Every weekend. DAVID Where? RORY Home, DAVID Every weekend? RORY Pretty much. DAVID He's asked your mother to marry him. But I didn't tell you that. RORY He already told me. Asked if I minded. DAVID Do you? RORY No. DAVID Has he been married before? RORY Yeah. DAVID Has he got any kids? RORY Two. Girls. DAVID Where are they? RORY Be has them some weekends. DAVID You get on?

(CONTINUED) 119 CONTINUED: ( 3)

RORY They're pretty cute, David chucks the phone at Rory who drops it on the floor. RORY (CONT'D) What'd the fuck did you do that for? He picks the phone up and checks it's working.

RORY ( CONT ' D ) Geez. Give him the pills. Rory goes inside, still fiddling with the phone. DAVID Why didn't you ever get married again? Frank goes on eating, ignoring the question. DAVID (CONT'D) Hum says you only married her because she was there.

I don't know what she means. DAVID She means you didn't love her, Frank says nothing, He pours himself a glass of water, He stares at the pills by the glass,

INT GOH'S HOTEL ROOM NIGHT 120 A FLASHBACK. Frank grabs two pills off the bathroom floor. He cradles a body in his arms. We see the back of the man's head only, Frank is frantically trying to stuff the pills in the man's mouth and make him swallow them.

INT/EXT FRANK'S VE DAY 121 Frank looks imploringly at David. DAVID What 7 David shows no mercy.

DAVXB (CONT' D ) You were having it off with Hanako weren't you? Where? In the kitchens?

(CONTINUED) 121 CONTINUED:

Frank looks down at his plate. His hands ball into fists.

DAVID (CONT'D) I: just want to hear it from you. Frank says nothing.

DAVID (CONT'D) It must have been terrible. Who could you tell? Frank enraged, sweeps his plate off the table, sending it and his water and his pills crashing to the floor.

DAVID (CONT'D) Not mum.

David comes to pick up the bits of broken plate and scraps. He picks up Frank's pills, dusts them off then puts them in front of Frank. He pours a glass of water and places it in front of Frank. He sits down heavily.

DAVID (CONT'D) So you faked it. Wrote her all those beautiful letters. Then married her. And by some fucking miracle had me. Frank looks at him, his face full of fear.

122 INT GOH'S HOTEL ROOM NIGHT 122

A FLASEIBACR. Frank cradles a man in his arms, rocking him back and forth, He is dead. Frank is crying, He takes the man's head in his hands,

DAY David takes Frank's face in his hands and makes him look straight at him.

DAVID I just want to hear you tell the truth for once. FNK X tried.

DAVID Try harder,

Is she coming back?

(CONTINUED) 122 CONTINUED:

DAVID Who? FUK Hanako . David lets go of Frank's face.

DAVID Setsuko. Hanako's dead. FRANK Is she coming back?

DAVID You want to have another go? Frank is confused.

DAVID (CONT'D) I don't think she's interested dad. David takes Frank by the hand and places the pills in his palm. He places the glass of water in his other hand.

What are these?

DAVID Happy pills. Take them.

Frank looks up at David. He chucks the water in David's face. FaANK Go fuck yourself,

RORY Way to go grandad.

David looks up to see Rory standing in the doorway, He has been there all the time, has heard everything. He starts clapping in mock aplause,

INT/EXT DAI'S VE DA NIGHT Setsuko sits next to Dai on a day bed out on the verandah. with a view across the city. He pours her some more wine. The remains of a dinner for two are on the table nearby. Dai has obviously gone to a lot of trouble, He watches her sip her wine.

(CONTINUED) 122 CONTINUED: (2)

DAI Jan's actually taken the kids to her sister's. She glances at him. He smiles. DAI (CONT'D) We're having some problems. He folds his legs up under him cross-legged. DAI (CONT'D) She's too good for me. Setsuko sips her wine. DAI (CONT'D) That's the impression she gives. SETSUKO I didn't see it. DAI She's very sure of things. Of facts. SETSUKO She's an historian. DAI Did you read the book? SETSUKO Yeah. DAI I've never read it. Setsuko looks at him. DAI (CONT'D) I got so bored with it. Everybody's war stories. Who cares? He looks at her, smiling. DAI (CONT'D) Then you come along. He can't take his eyes off her.

(CONTINUED) 12 2 CONTINUED: (3)

DAI (CONT'D) And everything's real again, Setsuko looks into her glass. SETSUKO That's why I went to see the camp. DAI I've never been. I don't want to go. She looks at him. DAI (CONT'D) Same reason I've never been to Japan. I'm not one of them. He gazes at her. DAI (CONT'D) Who'd want to be. Work until you drop. She looks away. Dai reaches out and puts his hand on hers. She lets him hold her hand for a moment, then moves her hand away. They sit in awkward silence. DAI (CONT'D) Sorry. He gets up and starts to clear away the dinner, Setsuko finishes her wine. 123 EXT DAI'S HOUSE NIGHT 123 A taxi stands outside Dai's house. Setsuko climbs in. The taxi drives away. EXT DAI's FRONT DOOR Dai shuts the door. He looks down at Jan and the children's shoes in an untidy pile at the entrance. He squats down and arranges them neatly in pairs. 124 INT FRANK'S KITCHEN MORNING 124 David cracks eggs into a pan full of bacon. He takes his eye off the pan and sees smoke pouring from the toaster. Barry the dog waits for a handout.

(CONTINUED) 124 CONTINUE D :

David grabs the blackened toast, burning his fingers.

DAVID Shit. He chucks the toast into the sink.

DAVID (CONT'D) Rory! Breakfastt Dad ! The dog hears a car pull up outside and starts barking, hurtling towards the door, David puts on more toast.

Rory appears at the door.

RORY Have you seen my black pants.

DAVID Nuh, You're breakfast's ready. RQRY The cord ones, I left my phone in them.

DAVID With any luck you've lost them, Will you pack your stuff up now? Rory goes to have another look. The dog's barking is frantic.

DAVID (CONT'D) Barry! Shut the fuck up! David goes to investigate.

125 K'S GARDEN MORNING 125 David comes out onto the front veranda and sees Setsuko. The dog is leaping at her, recognising a friend.

DAVID Barry! Get down!

He goes down the stairs and meets Setsuko half way. She hands him an envelope.

(CONTINUED) 125 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO I wanted to return this to Frank, in case he thought I'd lost it.

David gazes at her, she at him. Then they look away, embarrassed, just Letting their hands touch briefly, with the dog running circles around them.

126 INT/EXT FRANK'S VERANDA DAY 126

Rory and Setsuko sit at the table on the veranda. Rory eats his breakfast. Frank's sits getting cold.

DAVID The pills knock him out, I'll wake him. SETSUKO Let me go. She gets up and goes down to the end of the veranda where Frank's room is. Rory and David exchange a glance.

127 INT GOH'S HOTEL ROOM NIGHT 127

A DREAM, Frank hauls Goh's body up onto the bed and stares for a minute at his face. Frank has been crying. He takes the bedsheet and places it over Goh's face. Suddenly the dead Goh sits up and stares at the space behind Frank ' s head. Frank spins around, Hanako is standing there smiling at Frank. She reaches out and touches his face.

128 K'S BEDROOM MORNING 128

Frank wakes with a cry. He sees Setsuko reaching out to touch him. He tries to get away from her. SETSUKO It's all right. I'm sorry. X scared you. He struggles to sit up. He stares at her, uncertain of who she i~,

SETSUKO (CONT'D) I came to see how you are.

She puts the envelope on the table beside the bed.

(CONTINUED) 128 CONTINUED:

SETSUKO (CONT'D) L brought the photograph back. He looks up at her.

Hanako. Setsuko smiles. SETSUKO I was hoping you would come with me today to see my father.

He ' s here? SETSUKO He died Frank. Frank Looks as if he's about to cry.

I'm so sorry. SETSUKO I'm going to say goodbye, I was hoping you'd come with me. FWK Where's David. SETSUKO He's coming too. She takes his hand and holds it. Frank looks down at his hand in hers SETSUKO (CONT'D) I saw Edna. FRANK Who? SETSUKO She said to tell you she's sorry. Frank looks blank, 129 EXT FRANK'S STmET DAY Setsuko and Rory stand by the car waiting.

(CONTINUED) 129 CONTINUED:

David waits by the front door. 130 INT FRANK'S BATHROOM DAY 130 Frank is standing in front of the mirror. He holds two pills in his hand, stares at them, then puts them back in the bottle. He combs his hair. He straightens his tie. He watches himself and for a moment he is doing the same thing sixty years before. 131 INT RUSHWORTH OFFICERS QUARTERS EVENING 131 A FLASHBACK. Young Frank, in formal uniform, straightens his tie, flattens his hair, stares at himself in the small army issue mirror hanging on the wall by his bunk. He turns, picks up his hat and leaves the room. 132 EXT RUSHWORTH OFFICER'S QUARTERS EVENING 132 Frank stands on the front steps of his quarters. An OLDER GUARD, rifle slung over one shoulder walks past. GUARD Who's the lucky girl sir? Frank smiles. 133 EXT FRANK'S HOUSE DAY Frank stands at the door smiling at David. DAVID Did you take your pills? FRANK I'm fine. David watches him go down the steps. 134 EXT CEMETERY DAY 134 Setsuko places flowers by her father's ashes. Frank, David and Rory watch her. She stands up and puts her hands together, claps twice and bows her head. Frank stares at the name on the wall: 135 INT/EXT CAR DAY 135 Frank stares out of the car as they drive out of the cemetery and up the hill, through bushland, He remembers a drive sixty years before. 136 INT/EXT ARMY TRUCK EVENING 136 A FLASHBACK. Frank stares out of the passenger window of an army truck at the passing bushland. A GUARD is at the wheel. GUARD Who're you taking to the dance sir? FRANK I'm on my own. GUARD That's no good. I could've fixed you UP * FRANK I'm fine. Frank looks at him. FRANK (CONT'D) Not a word to the Commandant about the cooks. There's a crate of whisky in it. GUARD Me lips are sealed, 137 EXT RUSHWORTH TOWN WALL EVENING 137 The truck pulls up outside the town hall. Inside the band can be heard warming up. The guard keeps watch while Frank spirits half a dozen INTERNEES, men and women, off the truck and into the back of the hall. The last off the truck are Banako and Gob. Frank helps them down and watches Hanako follow the others through the back door, Hanako glances back at him as she disappears. Frank and Goh start unloading provisions. FRANK What did you tell your father? YOUNG GOH Japanese study circle.

(CONTINUED) 137 CONTINUED:

They exchange a smile. 138 IN% RUSHWORTH TOW HALL KITCHEN EVENING 138 Frank watches while the internees transform the provisions into dinner. They work in silence, the music drifting in from next door. Hanako shows Goh how to chop carrots fast. He looks up at Frank and laughs. Frank smiles. Hanako chops with lightning speed. 139 LATER. .. 139 Soup is bubbling away on the stove. Hanako motions to Frank to come and taste, He leans over. She blows on a spoonful of soup then feeds it to him, It is delicious. 140 LATER. . . 140 The dance is in full swing, The internees peep through gaps in the wall at the DANCERS, men from the camp and girls from the town. The band plays up a storm. Hanako spies Frank standing alone at the side of the hall watching the dancing, a smile on his face, a drink in his hand. A GIRL is trying to make conversation but Frank isn't interested. 141 EXT RUSHWORTH TOWN HALL NIGHT 141 Frank, smoking a cigarette, comes to the back door. He watches as the internees dance with each other around the kitchen. He sees Goh standing alone to one side. He catches his eye. They exchange a smile, Goh comes out into the darkness. He looks for Frank. Frank is standing under the light on the side of the garage out the back of the hall. Goh walks across to him, checking that no one is looking, Frank holds up a bar of chocolate so Goh can see the wrapper sparkle in the light, They disappear inside,

They make love urgently in the back of a truck parked in the garage, finishing quickly, They lie side by side,

I will alway~love you. Until the day I die. Goh props himself up on his elbow and gazes into Frank's face,

(CONTINUED ) 14 2 CONTINUED:

GOH Got any more chocolate? Frank picks up the empty wrapper and throws it playfully into Goh's face. 1-43 INT MSTAURANT DAY 143 Frank gazes at Setsuko across the lunch table. They are in the middle of ordering. A WAITRESS stands beside Frank with her notebook ready. DAVID Frank? Frank looks at him. DAVID (CONT'D) What are you having? Frank looks at the menu, FRANK I'm not very hungry, DAVID Soup? Frank looks at him. FRANK Excuse me for a moment. He gets up and makes his way out towards the toilets. RORY Steakburger please. With chips. 144 EXT RESTAURANTDAY 144 The restaurant has a spectacular view. Frank comes outside and makes his way over to the fence. He looks out at the city in the distance. He hears Japanese being spoken. He finds a seat and sits down, JAPANESE TOURISTS mill about in front of him, commenting on the weather, He catches the eye of a MAN in his seventies, Re stares at him for a moment. DAVID (0/S) Dad?

(CONTINUED) 144 CONTINUED:

Frank looks up. David sits down beside him. DAVID (CONT'D) Do you want some lunch? FWK When are we going to see Goh? David looks at him. DAVID We've just been. Frank looks confused. DAVID (CONT'D) Come and eat something, FWK (SHOUTING) I'm not hungry! DAVID Fine. Okay. I think everyone heard you. A few tourists stare. FRANK Have they got any chocolate? DAVID We'll ask them. He helps Frank up and walks him back towards the restaurant. INT mSTAUWT DAY 145 While the others eat their lunch in silence, Frank breaks pieces off a chocolate bar and puts them in his mouth. FRANK Your father loved chocolate, Setsuko looks at him. FRANK (CONT'D) I used to reward him with bars of chocolate. SETSUKO Reward him for what?

(CONTINUED) 145 CONTINUED:

Frank's gazes at her, his mind wandering. EXT RUSHWORTH COMPOUND DAY 146 Young Frank marches across the dusty yard towards Hanako's hut. He is upset. Goh looks up from his book and sees him coming. He stands up, sensing something is wrong. Wall-eyed, Frank approaches. FRANK Where's your mother? GOH The kitchens. Frank says nothing. Goh has never seen him like this. They stare at each other. EXT RUSHWORTH HANAKO'S HUT DAY 147 The WOMAN next door watches Frank enter the hut, followed by Goh.

INT RUSHWORTH HANAKO's HUT DAY Goh and Frank sit awkwardly side by side on Goh's stretcher bed. Frank takes two books out of his jacket and places them on the box that does as a bedside table. GOH Where are you going? FRANK They haven't said. Goh stares at the Japanese wooden thongs on his feet. FRANK (CONT'D) I'll come back for you. After the war. GOH What if they send us away? FRANK I'll write to them. I won't let it happen. Goh shakes his head.

(CONTINUED) 148 CONTINUED :

GOH It won't make any difference. We don't fit anywhere do we. Frank takes a handful of chocolate bars out of his pocket and puts them down on the bed. Goh looks at him and sees that he is crying. 149 EXT RUSHWORTH COMPOUND DAY 149 Maeda strides across the yard with his customary violence. EXT/INT RUSHWORTH HANAMO's HUT DAY Maeda approaches the hut, mounts the steps and opens the door. In front of him Goh and Frank are sitting side by side on the bed, They are looking at a book open on Goh's knee. Maeda bows to Frank briefly then goes and grabs the book violently out of Goh's hands. MAEDA (IN JAPANESE) I thought I said these English lessons had to stop! Goh says nothing. Frank stands up. He is wiping his face to get rid of the tears. FRANK I asked Goh to teach me some Japanese Mr Maeda. Maeda looks at the book in his hands and sees it is in Japanese, one of his in fact. Maeda looks at the chocolate on the bed, then at Goh, then at Frank. He puts the book down quietly. FWK(CONT'D) We've just finished. Goh and Frank sidestep out of the room and leave the hut. Maeda glares at Goh's bed then kicks it violently. The two English books Frank gave Goh fall out from under the mattress. He picks them up and rips them to pieces. 150 EXT RUSHWORTH COMPOUND DAY 150 Frank and Goh walk across the compound in silence.

151 EXT EIUSN[WORTH FENCE DAY 151 Goh stops a couple of metres inside the fence, He watches Frank march through the front gates of the camp, salute to the Cornandant and climb into an army car. The car slowly makes its way along the road parallel to the fence. Goh walks the fence to keep abreast of it.

He is joined by a dozen younger CHILDREN. They all keep up with the car until they reach the corner of the fence where there is a giant watchtower.

They stop dead at the foot of the tower. The car races away from them.

152 INT MYCAR DAY 152

Frank wa.tches from the back seat of the car, his heart breaking. The cap vanishes in the dust thrown up by the car's tyres on the dirt road,

153 INT RESTA T DAY 153 Frank Looks at Setsuko.

FRANK I betrayed your father, I put him in danger, Maeda was a violent man.

EXT RUSHWORTH HAMAKO's HUT DAY The neighbour watches out her window, She can hear Maeda shouting at Goh, throwing him against the walls. She can hear Eanako begging him to stop,

154 EXT JEYPAEJESE GARDEN DAY 154

A wedding party is posing for photographs in the Japanese gardens, part of the botanic gardens. Setsuko and Prank walk side by side. David and Rory follow. Frank watches the happy couple smiling into the camera and is suddenly back at his own wedding to Maddie. 155 EXT COMMANDANT'S GARDEN DAY 155 A small WEDDING PARTY is gathered on the lawn at the Commandant's house following Frank and Maddie's wedding. The Commandant and Frank are both still in uniform, The bride and groom get into position for a photograph, the YOUNG MADDIE looking radiant. THE PHOTOGRAPHER Looks up. PHOTOGRAPHER Bit closer. Maddie steps closer to Frank. Frank steps a little further away. PHOTOGRAPHER (CONT'D) Try to look happy Frank. Frank gives a hollow smile. The Commandant and a FRIEND stand back a little, watching. FRIEND Handsome young chap. COWDLnaNT He's a good sort, He's not only after one thing like that Yank she had in tow. Maddie plants a kiss on Frank's cheek. He pulls back from her, so slightly only she notices. EXT PAMELA'S STREET AFTERNOON 156 Frank stares out the window as David and Rory get out of the car. Setsuko gets out. She gives Rory a hug. She waves to him as he and David walk away. SETSUKO Come and see me. I'll show you Hollywood. RORY But are they ready for me? He grins at her and waves. She laughs. David puts a hand on Rory's shoulder.

(CONTINUED) 156 CONTINUED:

Pamela comes out to meet them, She watches Setsuko getting back into the car with Frank.

David spots the Saab in the garage. MARTIN comes out with a polishing cloth in one hand, some interior spray in the other. We nods to David. We is wearing stubbies. Rory goes inside.

PAMELA ( CONT ' D ) (to RORY) Ayen't you going to say hello? RORY (C0LDLY)Wello. David glances at him, realising everything prior to this has been bravado. That Rory really can't stand Martin. MA;RTIN Rory. Come back here. Pamela looks nervously at David, Rory doesn't came back, DAVID I'm Rory's father. PAMELA You've actually met. DAVID I'm sorry, I forgot. We goes towards Martin and extends his hand feigning warmth and enthusiasm. Martin juggles the cloth and spray and shakes David's hand. MARTIN Martin Sakes. DAVID David Chambers. Pamela wears a frozen smile. DAVID (CONT'D) Rory tells me you two are getting married, They are both caught out momentarily.

(CONTINUED) 156 CONTINUED: (2)

Pamela takes Martin firmly by the hand. MARTIN Taking the plunge. DAVID Not for the first time. Pamela glares at him. Martin stares David down. MTIN Second time round. Rory appears in the doorway to take a last look at David. RORY See you dad. David looks up at him. They exchange a smile. DAVID See you mate. Hang in there. RORY You too. David turns to go. As he walks away he hears Pamela chiding Rory . PAMELA Don't just walk past when Martin says hello. Where are your manners? David climbs back into his car. Pamela waves to Frank. Frank waves back. The car pulls away, fast. INT RORY's ROOM AFTERNOON Frank sleeps deeply. His letters to Maddie are spilling out of their box next to his bed. He has one of them in his hand. PNT DAVID'S BEDROOM AFTERNOON David, half-naked, sits in a chair next to the bed watching Setsuko sleep. She opens her eyes. They gaze at each other.

(CONTINUED) 156 CONTINUED: (3)

DAVID Don ' t go back.

SETSUKO I have to.

DAVID I*.. She puts her finger to her lips to stop him going on. He comes back to bed and folds himself around her back.

SETSUKO I haven't thanked you.

DAVID For what?

SETSUKO For your help.

He kisses her ear.

DAVID I thought you just did.

She turns to look at him,

DAVID (CONT ' D) It's me should be thanking you.

SETSUKO Where's the nearest Asian grocer?

DAVID You can't cook on your last night.

SETSUKO Well you can't cook.

He pulls her hair. They laugh.

157 INT ASIAN SUPERMARKET EVENING 157

At the local ~siangrocer Setsuko carries her full basket to the checkout and pays. David wanders after her, picking up exotic groceries, peering at them, putting them back.

158 EXT WEST END STREET EVENING 158

David waits in the driver's seat, She loads up the shopping, then climbs in. 159 K'S KITCHEN EVENING 159 David dumps all the provisions onto the kitchen bench, Setsuko i.s looking for knives in the drawer. She finds an apron and puts it on. She starts work, David can't take his eyes off her. She chops vegetables at lightning speed, 160 LATER. . . 160 Soup is boiling away on the stove, Setsuko watches over it. David hands her a glass of wine. SETSUKO My mother said the only thing she missed about my father was his cooking. DAVID You never talk about your mother. SETSUKO She died when I: was fourteen. Hanako raised me, Setsuko blows on a spoonful and feeds it to David,

161 ZNT FWK'SBATHROOM NIGHT 161 Frank stands in front of the mirror combing his hair. He straightens a blue bow tie. He is a11 ready to go out. He looks at the packet of pills with the post it sticker on it where David has written in big letters, 2 AT NIGHT. He puts them back. Be combs his hair again.

INT FWR's BATHROOM NIGHT A FTJASHBACK*Frank combs his hair in front of his bathroom mirror. He straightens his bow tie, a red one. He leaves the room, switching off the light as he goes. He slams the door behind h.im. It makes a sickening thud.

162 INT FRANK'S LIVING ROOM NIGHT 162 Frank walks down the passage from the bathroom towards the kitchen where he can see David and Setsuko, INT FRANK'S KITCHEN NIGHT Frank appears at the kitchen door, looking anxious, David and Setsuko look up. FRANK I'm running late. SETSUKO Mo. You're fine.

PRANK (to DAV1D)I wonder if you could give me a lift. DAVID Where to? Frank looks at him. It is obvious to David his father hasn't a clue where he is. FWK It's in town. DAVID Where are you going? Frank looks at Setsuko, He starts to understand he has made a mistake. FRANK I'm sorry. Setsuko smiles at him. SETSUKO You must be so hungry Frank. You've only had chocolate all day,

I bought some chocolate. I thought he'd like that. David pours him a glass of wine and hands it to him, DAVID Setsuko's cooking us dinner dad. Hanako's recipe. FRANK Hanako was a good cook,

(CONTINUED) 163 CONTINUED:

Re smiles at Setsuko. SETSUKO Yes she was.

David raises his glass.

DAVID To absent friends.

They each take a sip of wine.

1NT/EXT FWK'S VERANDA NIGHT 164 They are sitting at dinner. Setsuko hands Frank another dish to try. She serves David some more food.

DAVlD How did she live? SETSUKO She worked in Tokyo, in a place the Americans liked. She knew how to cook western style food,

DAVXD What about Goh? SETSUKO He started out when he was about sixteen, Sn hotels. He spoke good English. I guess that helped. He was popular with American officers.

DAVXD (to FWK) Didn't you try to find them?

Frank Looks at David. He stops eating. FRANK I was married. David stares at him.

DAVID But Maddie didn't know, You could have told her some story. Frank looks from David to Setsuko.

(CONTINUED) 164 CONTINUED :

SETSUKO It doesn't matter Frank. David looks at her. SETSUKO (CONT'D) (TO DAVID) It really doesn't matter. DAVID It does matter. It explains everything. It explains why he was so cold to me when I was growing up. Why he treated my mother like a sister he didn't particularly like. Why the house was always like someone had just died. FRANK He's not dead! He came here! He came to see me! Setsuko and David exchange a glance. DAVID He died dad. FRANK I wrote letters. I tried to help. But it wasn't possible to do anything, DAVID Who did you write letters to? FRANK The army. As soon as I heard they were deporting them to Japan. 165 INT ARMY OFFICES 1946 DAY 165 Young Frank, in uniform, stands in the office of an ARMY ADMINISTRATOR pleading with the man to see sense. The man holds Frank's letter in his hand. FRANK(V.0.) I told them she was born here. Goh was born here. They had no means of support in Japan. No family ... Then administrator looks down at the letter periodically and shakes his head gravely. Frank looks completely desperate.

(CONTINUED) 165 CONTINUED:

FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) But these people were not human. They had no human feelings... His request is declined. FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) Inside their uniforms they were stone. The army is full of them.

The administrator gives him a stony look, then files the letter away, waiting for Frank to leave the room. Frank storms out, slamming the door behind him. It makes a sickening thud. On the office door are the words ENEMY ALIENS. 166 EXT DOCKS 1946 NIGHT 166 In the rain, the Young Frank pushes through a CROWD of thuggish onlookers and comes to a fence. All around him men and women spit invective at the people on the other side. FRANK (V.O.) Everybody hated the Japs. THUG #1 Fuckin' Nips! Go home where you came from! At this an armed GUARD the other side of the fence pushes the crowd back off the wire. GUARD Get back! Frank, jostled from both sides, clings to the fence searching for Hanako and Goh. FRANK(V.0.) I went down to see them. On the other side of the fence army trucks unload their cargo of Japanese internees. WOMEN and CHILDREN and OLD MEN climb down from the trucks under heavy guard. The GUARDS are all armed. They join a sorry herd shuffling towards the gangplank, which hangs off the side of a rustbucket, seemingly on its last legs and much too small to take them all.

(CONTINUED) 166 CONTINUED:

FEIANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) But it was too late by then, There was nothing I could do, I just stood there. And watched it happen. Frank spots Hanako and Goh in the mob. He can't call out. He can't wave. He just watches them as they lug their tiny suitcases down from the truck and join the queue. Up ahead of them one of the internees, A MAN, stalls at the foot of the gangplank, refusing to board, A guard puts a gun at his head.

The !ZAH is in tears. He begs to be allowed to stay. The GUARD grows more and more agitated. The crowd around Frank cranes to see what's going on. Frank loses sight of Hanako and Goh. He pushes through the crowd to try to find an opening in the fence. We finds a gap in the fence, shows his army papers to the GUARD, and runs to where the man is refusing to board. FWK(V.0.) (CONT'D) There was a man whose wife had died in the camp. He didn't want to leave her. The din of the crowd grows louder and angrier, drowning out every other sound, FWK(V.0.) (GONT'D) I told hlim he could come back. One day. When everything was forgotten. Frank bows to the man, standing between he and the guard with the gun. The man bows to Frank. They talk for a moment. Frank manages to calm him down. Frank turns and talks to the guard. He lowers his gun, FWK(V.0.) (CONT'D) It's what I believed. The man wipes his eyes, turns and walks up the gangplank. Goh spots Frank and runs to him, flinging his arms around Frank's neck. Frank sees Hanako waiting in the queue. A GUARD comes and pulls Goh off pushing him back to where he was in the queue, Frank stands helplessly by. Goh weeps. Frank watches them mount the gangplank and disappear onto the deck of the boat, The rain falls. 167 EXT FRANK'S STREET NIGHT 167

A light rain starts to fall. Frank stands with his arms around Setsuko. David waits in the car. FRANK I'm so glad you came to see me. SETSUKO So am I. They part.

SETSUKO (CONT ' D) You look after yourself.

FRANK I'm not sure 1 can. He smiles sadly. She smiles back and climbs into the car. David leans across to talk to Frank.

DAVID Get in out of the rain dad. I won't be long.

Frank stands waving them off. He is smiling.

INT/EXT CAR NIGHT 168 Setsuko is on the verge of tears. She watches out the window. SETSUKO Have you got a cigarette?

David opens the glove box. She helps herself. She lights a cigarette. Her hands are shaking, SETSUKO (CONT'D) I don't want you to come to the airport in the morning. I hate goodbyes.

David says nothing* Setsuko snuffles and wipes her nose, trying to hide her tears. 169 EXT SETSUKO'S HOTEL NIGHT 169 David pulls into Setsuko's hotel and cuts the engine. Setsuko gets out. He comes around to meet her. They embrace. They talk over each other,

DAVID I'll write to you. SETSUKO I'll ring you.

DAVID I just have to sort out what I'm going to do about Frank. SETSUKO I have to explain to Ken. He needs to hear everything from me. I've kind of protected him. You know? Tried to pretend things were good, She walks away, He watches her go.

As she reaches the front doors she turns and waves. He waves back.

170 EXT FRANK'S STREET NIGHT 170

David pulls up outside the house.

He goes inside.

171 INT/ExT FRANK'S ROUSE NIGHT 171 David comes through the house. He finds Frank on the veranda in his pyjamas. Be is sitting staring out into the garden.

FRANK Where's Rory?

DAVID Be's at Pamela's. David sits down next to him.

He sees that Frank has a glass of water by his side and has lined his pills up next to it.

(CONTINUED) 171 CONTINUED :

FRANK I miss him. He looks up at David. David smiles sadly. FRANK (CONT'D) You'll have to look out for him. It's hard. DAVID I'm doing my best. Frank takes a firm hold of David's hand. FRANK I went to see him. DAVID When? FRANK I went to see Goh. While you were out. INT GOH'S HOTEL ROOM NIGHT Goh lies on his bed with his eye mask on and his earplugs in. The phone is ringing beside the bed. He ignores it for a moment then sits up and takes off his mask. He picks up the phone. FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) I went to his hotel. Somewhere in the city. 172 INT GOH'S HOTEL NIGHT 172 Frank, wearing his red tie, stands at the reception desk. The CLERK puts down the phone and tells Frank to go on up. Frank makes his way to the lifts. FRANK(V.0.) The Hilton I think. One of the big ones. 173 INT GOH'S HOTEL CORRIDOR NIGHT Frank emerges from the lift and sees Goh standing at the end of the corridor. He walks towards him. Goh comes the other way. They meet half way and fall into each other's arms.

(CONTINUED) 173 CONTINUED:

FRANK (V.O.) He was an old man. They hold each other at arm's length and look at each other. They see that they are both old men. INT GOH's HOTEL ROOM NIGHT The two old men sit opposite each other, drinking whisky. Frank produces a couple of chocolate bars from his pocket and pushes them across the table to Goh. Goh smiles. He goes to his suitcase and takes out a plastic bag full of Japanese chocolates in exotic wrappers. He passes it to Frank. They are the same ones Frank had at the soccer match. Frank unwraps one and puts it in his mouth. Goh starts to talk. Frank watches his hands as he pours more whisky. The television is on with no sound, FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) He told me the story of his life. He was married. He had a daughter he hadn't seen for twenty years. He had a grandson in America he'd never met. Goh takes a photograph out of his wallet and shows it to Frank. It is the one of Setsuko and Ken he has carried around for years. He explains who they are. Frank takes out the photograph of Hanako and Goh taken on the hospital veranda and pushes it across the table, asking if he remembers when that was taken. While Frank is talking Goh reaches over and takes hold of Frank ' s hand. FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) He told me he had always dreamed of coming back to see me but that his work had kept him busy. They gaze into each other's eyes. Goh has tears in his eyes. Overwhelmed, he gets up to go into the bathroom.

FRANK(V.0. ) (CONT'D) He was sorry now that he'd left it so long.

Frank looks in the mirror. He sees Goh's feet in the hallwav..' He rushes to help him and finds him collapsed on the bathroom floor, a bottle of pills spilling from his hand. Frank grabs a couple of pills and frantically tries to make Goh swallow them, but Goh's heart has stopped beating,

(CONTINUED) 173 CONTINUED: (2)

FRANK(V.0.) (CONT'D) And then I lost him again. Frank yells at him to come back as he tries to revive him, He gives him the kiss of life, but to no avail, Exhausted, he sits on the floor with Goh's body cradled in his arms, and rocks him to and fro. 174 EXT FRANK'S VERANDA NIGHT 174 David stares at his father. Frank turns and looks at him. FRAMK He died of a heart attack. DAVID I know. FRANK I tried to help him. INT GOB'S HOTEL ROOM NIGHT 175 Frank hauls Goh's body up onto the bed and lays him out there. He sits down on the bed, then lies down next to Goh, curling himself around the dead man's body. AN HOUR LATER..- Frank gets up off the bed. He straightens out the covers. He looks around the room. He straightens the furniture. He looks at himself in the mirror. He swallows another whisky. He straightens his hair, his tie. He looks like he has been crying. He picks up his whisky glass and takes it into the bathroom. He washes it under the tap and dries it with a towel. He puts it upside down on the side of the washbasin. He goes back into the room, He stands by the television. The sports report is showing highlights of a rugby match. He switches it off. He sees the chocolates under the light and picks them up. He puts them in his pocket. He looks up. He sees the lime green chair reflected in the mirror. He turns and walks to the bed. He leans over and kisses Goh on the mouth.

(CONTINUED) 175 CONTINUED:

He goes to the door of the room. He puts his hand on the handle, turns it. He goes out. 176 EXT GOH'S HOTEL CORRIDOR NIGHT 176 Frank emerges from Goh's room and shuts the door. It makes a sickening thud behind him as he walks down the corridor towards the lift. 177 EXT FRANK'S VERANDA NIGHT 177 Frank holds on so tightly to David's hand hurts. FRANK I wanted you to know. DAVID It's okay. It wasn't your fault. FRANK How much I love you. David looks at him. FRANK (CONT'D) Before I forget. David leans forward and puts his arms around his father and holds him close, not wanting to let him go. 178 INT AIRPORT DAY 178 David and Rory make their way across the huge expanse of the departure lobby hauling a big suitcase each. They head for the Qantas section and queue up for a flight to Los Angeles.

DAVID (V. 0.) Dear Setsuko, Is it possible to die of wanting someone? I think it might be. I can't breathe properly. My heart skips every time I think of you, which is every minute. I'm terrified. I love you always, Until I die. David. 179 INT RETIREMENT HOME DAY 179 Frank sits playing cards with a group of very elderly WOMEN in the lounge room of his retirement village. FRANK Is it me?

(CONTINUED) 179 CONTZNUE D:

His partner, a sweet-faced OLD LADY, looks up at him, concerned. PARTNER You just had your turn. Frank shrugs like a naughty boy who's been caught, A staff member, a CHINESE MALE NURSE called Winston, Late twenties, very handsome, stops on his way through to chat, Frank can't take his eyes off him. WINSTON How is everyone? ELDERLY WOMEN Still alive Winston. Only just. Speak for yourself, Winston looks at Frank. WINSTON How do you cope with all these women Frank? Frank smiles. FRANK My grandson is coming today, With David my son. I think you've met them. WINSTON Not today. When they get back from America. FRANK Of course. It isn't today. Winston smiles at Frank, a radiant, beautiful smile. Frank smiles back.

6. Living Bodies

‘Film is a value-constructed medium and thus anything you can do to destroy clichés/stereotypes counts’ (Horton, 1994, p. 125). These are

Andrew Horton’s encouraging words to screenwriters who would

write work that is character centred rather than constrained by plot.

Films, Horton suggests (1994, p. 53), are like fairy tales. They are ‘by

nature value-encoded narratives, and to avoid the honest sense of character inherent in the material is to rob viewers…of what narratives should offer’. But what is an ‘honest sense of character’? And how is it possible to replace clichés and stereotypes with characters alive enough to inspire such a sense?

The purpose of this study has been to explore firstly how orientalist prescription has worked to delimit the range of Japanese, and by inference other Asian characters, in recent Australian mainstream films, and secondly how to write Japanese characters capable of defying orientalism’s powerful logic. Within this logic Japanese characters in Australian films are inscribed with ‘surplus symbolic value’ (Carby, 1995, p. 174). That is they are made to ‘stand for something beside themselves’. Aso and Yukio are made to stand for

Japanese warriors. JM and Hiro are made to stand for Japanese

tourists. Unable to be themselves, these characters slide quickly into cliché and stereotype, and the narratives in which they appear into conscious or unconscious expressions of ideology. According to

Graeme Turner,

the relationship between each [film] text and its culture is traceable to

ideological roots…the text is a kind of battleground for competing and

often contradictory positions. Of course this competition usually

results in a victory for the culture’s dominant positions, but not without

leaving cracks or divisions through which we can see the

consensualizing work of ideology exposed. (1999, p. 171)

Turner goes on to describe what these cracks and divisions feel like for

the viewer (1999, p. 172). They are those moments in a film when the

characters do or say something that is felt to be unconvincing or

arbitrary. They are film endings that are felt to be unresolved, not for

some deliberate aesthetic or narrative purpose but because ‘of a failure

to unite the ideological alternatives’ with authority.

Turner’s description of the ideological workings of film is reminiscent

of Roland Barthes notion that ‘characters are types of discourse’ (1974,

p.179), meaning that they are a process rather than a product, a site of

flux, rather than a fixed state. Regarded in this way, characters are

unburdened of the necessity to represent or symbolise ideological positions, and are at liberty to follow the dialogical impulse, with all its attendant risk. It is the nature of this risk and its potential rewards that this project has been concerned to illuminate, firstly in order to better understand why Australian filmmakers routinely choose to avoid it, and secondly to see how it might generate new cinematic paradigms

for Asian/Australian relations.

What does it mean to say that character is process? And how can

screenwriters be helped by the notion of character as a site of flux to

imagine the Asian other differently? Philosopher Charles Taylor

describes the formation of subjective identity in the following way:

My discovering of my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in

isolation but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly

internal, with others. This is why the development of an ideal of

inwardly generated identity gives a new importance to recognition.

My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with

others…Yet inwardly derived personal identity doesn’t enjoy this

recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt

can fail. (Taylor, 1992, pp.34-35)

In other words identity, whether personal or cultural or ethnic, can no

longer be regarded as fixed and unchanging, but as a process of

constant transformation. This process can be more or less successful depending on the desires and fears of the parties involved, but without

a willingness to engage in it at the outset it is doomed to be

unproductive of anything beyond familiar, stereotypical notions of

character. That the possibility of transformation is felt to be dangerous

by some is unsurprising, given that for so long the world has been

imagined as consisting of a ‘civilised’ centre and a boundary ‘other’ –

the boundary being a site of ‘hybridisation or inmixing in which self

and other become enmeshed in an inclusive, heterogenous,

dangerously unstable zone’ (Sibley, 1995, p. 51). This imagined map of

the world locates whiteness firmly at the centre and non-whiteness at

the margin, and has the power, as we have seen, to undermine narratives that purport to be about contemporary interracial relations

by turning them into anxiously repetitive tales of white supremacy.

How contemporary interracial relations might be otherwise imagined

is an essential question to be faced by any filmmaker today who wishes

to engage with the challenges of making intercultural stories that move beyond cliché. The fear of this engagement is a real one, firstly because it is inherently difficult to overcome cliché and secondly because the engagement gives rise to the disturbing possibility that the cliché might be an over-simplified expression of a reality we do not wish to acknowledge. As Julia Kristeva has pointed out

[l]iving with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the

possibility, or not, of being an other. It is not simply – humanistically –

a matter of being able to accept the other but of being in his place, and

this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself. (Kristeva,

1991, p.13)

Many prefer to turn away from this possibility, even some producers

of culture who might be expected to embrace the dramatic potential of

foreignness at home, of Asia in Australia. But to reject the possibility is

to preclude the production of ‘an honest sense of character’ in filmic

explorations of intercultural relations, and to radically curtail the

chances that film narratives of Australia will contain any surprises.

In Secrets and Lies (1996), English filmmaker Mike Leigh tells the story

of a black woman who decides to find her birth mother after the death

of the woman by whom she was adopted and lovingly raised in a black

family. There is an unforgettable scene in the film when the main character is sitting next to her natural mother in a cheap café. They have only just met face to face for the first time. The mother is white, an uneducated factory worker and single parent to an adult, white,

street sweeper daughter. The black daughter, Hortense, is middle class,

an optometrist, a professional at adjusting the way people see the

world. In the café scene the mother at first denies the possibility that

Hortense is hers. ‘Just look at you,’ she says. ‘I never went with a black man in all my life’. In the next moment her expression registers a kind of horror as she remembers that one and only time. We know in that moment that Hortense is her daughter, and that she now has a stark choice to make. She can either reject Hortense’s desire for a relationship, or she can accept it. If she accepts it, her life will never be the same again. Equally torn between fear and desire Hortense has a similar choice. She can reject her mother as an ignorant slattern, or she can embrace her as an other who is at the same time, however discomforting the thought, herself.

In this fascinating and intensely moving film the two women embark on a relationship that begins as a secret, almost guilty liaison, a seduction of sorts, of the mother by the daughter. Having fallen in love with her daughter the mother eventually decides it is time to introduce her to her white family who are presented in their turn with a choice.

Either they can reject the whole idea of possessing a black relation, or they can allow that the ‘other’ is in fact family. This is not a sentimental decision, nor even an ideological one. Mike Leigh’s work is exceptional in that neither sentiment nor ideology is permitted to distort the narrative force which underpins it, which is always character. What drives the narrative in Secrets and Lies, is not so much a competition between different ideologies, as a struggle between complex and

contradictory desires. What Mike Leigh succeeds in presenting in his films is character unfettered by surplus ideological or symbolic value.

In this way anything becomes possible including the dissolution, by

desire, of class and race as markers of difference.

As an illustration of how interracial relations in the cinema might be

re-imagined Secrets and Lies is arguably yet to be bettered. For a

screenwriter interested in writing characters capable of defying

stereotypical assumptions, the risks that film embraces and the

methods by which Leigh translates risk into drama are worth

examining further. According to Garry Watson (2004, p. vii), Mike

Leigh’s method of working can be best understood as an attempt not to

represent the real but to give the viewer an experience of what Simone

Weil has called (1977, p.292) ‘the actual density of the real’ in the

cinema. This approach implies an understanding of reality that is not

the common one applied to film narratives where plot so often

precedes and outweighs character. In Mike Leigh’s work the exact

opposite applies. His films are cast before they are written. In a formal

sense they are never written at all, but created from an arduous process

of improvisation based on real life. Leigh and his actors research and

create characters that are then brought together in improvised

encounters. Out of these encounters a narrative emerges. The director

progressively guides the narrative in the direction he feels it should

take, without dictating to the actors how their characters should respond to this direction. It is the spontaneity of their responses that make them real, initially for the actor and then, after painstaking rehearsal, for the viewer. What Leigh is striving to achieve by this method is, according to Terrence Rafferty

the possibility of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes -

someone specific, whose life can be shared only through patient

observation of its random and stubbornly idiosyncratic details. (1991,

p.104)

This is the ultimate purpose of the dialogical impulse discussed

previously, that impulse which Australian films so commonly evade in

favour of safer, more predictable narrative tools. Where plot proscribes character the power of dialogue to produce authentic, personal expressive moments recedes, and the expectation of surprise retreats.

What is experienced by the viewer is less the density of the real than the dishonesty and falsity of the ideological premise. This occurs at precisely those moments in the cinema when, as Graeme Turner has observed, an utterance or action seems arbitrary or a resolution contrived.

Leigh’s sense of reality rests on a belief that drama is inherent in everyday life and that the potential for transformation lies within

ordinary individuals. What Leigh’s films are typically doing according to Watson (2004, p. 23) is ‘both acknowledging and disclosing the ordinary and transforming it’. Skin colour becomes in Secrets and Lies less a marker of difference demanding that the ‘other’ be eliminated, than an acknowledgement of diversity as a common and potentially transformative feature of everyday experience. ‘The floodgates have been opened,’ says Cameron McCarthy (1998, p. 339), ‘and the swirling waters of difference now saturate the social field’, meaning that the choice to negate the other as a means of confirming dominance is no longer a valid or powerful narrative strategy for describing that field.

Difference, according to Eric Santner, does not signify a fixed and immutable state of being, rather a spiritual challenge to

truly inhabit the proximity of our neighbour… [and] assume

responsibility for the claims his or her singular uncanny presence

makes on us not only in extreme circumstances but every day’.

(Santner, 2001, p.7)

Therein lies the dramatic potential inherent in racial difference, for as

Santner acknowledges there is also available in everyday life the choice

to withdraw from difference, the possibility ‘of, as it were, not really

being there, of dying to the Other’s presence’ (2001, pp.9-10). Secrets

and Lies is a powerful film because the difficult choice to be alive to the

racial other is taken by both of the main characters. Japanese Story is a disappointing film because the interracial lovers are prevented by a contrivance from doing the same.

In both My Australian Life and The Rushworth War I have tried, within the conventions of mainstream screenwriting methods, to light a fire under the stereotypical. I have tried to write characters whose specificity and autonomy make them capable of confounding our expectations of them. In this way I have attempted to evolve narratives unburdened of the ideological imperatives that have undermined other recent Australian films dealing with Asian/Australian relations. Sam

Nakadai and Setsuko Forrester are not meant to represent the Japanese.

Nor are they meant to stand for the racial ‘Other’, that alien being, whose savagery or sublimity or inscrutability is required by the narrative to signal difference. What they are meant to stand for is themselves, ordinary people, of whom life demands difficult choices.

Alfred Hitchcock was of the belief that

the less the hero of the play is inflected, identified and characterised,

the more we will endow him with our own internal meaning – the

more we will identify with him…which is to say the more we will be

assured that we are that hero. (Mamet, 1991, p.38)

While being Asian is presented in Australian cinema as a gross inflection of normality, Asian characters will not come close to inviting this level of identification. Nor will local audiences, who are presented with diversity all the time in their daily lives, be given the choice whether to enter into ‘the play of difference’ (Sibley, 1995, p. 18) in the

cinema. In this way Australian films will continue to lag behind the

everyday, and will fail to exploit its potential for transformative drama.

Asia is in Australia, Australia is in Asia. This has been officially

declared so often we tend to take it as truth. But it is still far from true

in the national cinema. We have yet to make a film in Australia in

which Asian characters invite us to ‘truly inhabit the proximity of our

neighbour’ (Santner, 2001, p.7). Nor have we yet written an Asian film

hero or heroine of whom we can unreservedly say he or she is me. It is

time we tried.

7. Conclusion

This study has had two broad aims. The first has been to analyse the conventions in our cinema culture governing the representation of

Japanese characters in our screen stories. The second has been to

destabilise these conventions in my own work by writing Japanese

screen characters that do not conform to stereotypical expectations.

A close study of four recent Australian screen stories in which Japanese

characters appear has revealed the power of ideology to constrain our representation of the Japanese within the bounds of cliché. This indicates a deep and largely unexamined attachment in our film culture to stereotypical notions of Japan and the Japanese as Asian others. It also indicates a worrying lack of interest in screenwriting as a tool for breaking down narrative and ideological conventions of all kinds.

In order to inform my creative practice with more optimistic models of

writing race I have looked to filmmakers outside our own film culture.

Mike Leigh in particular stands out as a filmmaker concerned to invent

a method of writing which allows his characters to discover ways to

connect across formidable barriers of class and race. The meaning of

these connections lies in their power to transform both the characters

themselves and the viewer, through his or her identification with them.

As Australian film producer Peter Sainsbury has pointed out (2004, p.45) it is this transformative power, so often missing from Australian films, that gives drama its purpose.

The importance of the transformative power of drama cannot be underestimated. Cliches about race undermine the capacity of our cinema culture to construct narratives of who we truly are. What they reflect and in their turn reproduce is an ethically flawed world view in which an Anglo-Celtic or core culture is seen to be morally superior to marginal othered cultures such as that of the Japanese. This is the ethics underlying what Jon Stratton has called ‘official multiculturalism’ (1998, p.210). What transformative drama can offer in place of this flawed ethics is the idea of culture as ‘open and involving’

(ibid.). In an Australian context such an idea rests on the belief that

…cultures creolise and transform; on an individual basis, that a

person’s Australian culture is inflected by their background, and that

the migrant history of that background – including that of Anglo-Celts

– is itself transformed within Australia. (ibid.)

Cliches represent a notion of identity as fixed and immutable. In the context of racial identity fixed and unambiguous qualities are

attributed to ethnicity and the possibility of transformation is denied. I have explained how this works in Australian screen narratives in which Japanese characters play inhuman warrior/savages, and innocent tourist/lovers. By various narrative strategies - ideologically evolved rather than emerging from the characters themselves -

Japanese characters in Australian screen stories are prevented from engaging in true dialogue, and therefore from challenging the racist stereotypes they embody. In Changi, as I have argued above, the

Japanese represent undiluted savagery in order to validate both a notion of the moral superiority of white Australian males, and a belief in the permanent righteousness of racial enmity. In Heaven’s Burning

and Japanese Story the Japanese are variously shot, burned and

drowned for the betterment of the core Anglo-Celtic culture. In The

Goddess of 1967 the notion of Japan and the Japanese as the cool

quintessence of post-modernism makes race an aesthetic orthodoxy

that excludes the real, lived experience of ordinary Japanese. This is the

other as spectacle rather than as authentic subject.

While Mike Leigh’s methods of writing character are unavailable to me

I have taken important ethical lessons from them in the writing of The

Rushworth War and My Australian Life. All character-driven

screenwriting begins from a position of respect for the character as

autonomous subject. This respect arises from a notion of character as

complex, highly specific and, above all, real. In Mike Leigh’s work this grounding of character in the real is taken to extraordinary lengths, with the actors engaged for weeks in research and improvisation before the narrative begins to take shape in the director’s mind. This is

done out of a belief in the necessity for characters in films to represent

themselves in all their idiosyncratic detail, not to represent some type

that is stripped of individual idiosyncrasy. The imperative behind this belief has been described by Leigh in the following way:

As when you’re in the subway, right up against someone, you have to

look at them, though you try not to, you have to see them, hear them,

smell them. That’s what it’s about really. (interview in Movshovitz,

2000, p.20)

Implied in this imperative is also the understanding that we have the

option to turn away. ‘Leigh’s films,’ according to Garry Watson, ‘are

also concerned to make us aware of our defensive tendency to remove

and defend ourselves from the midst of life.’ (2004, p.26).

Screen stories that are ideologically driven, rather than character-

driven, act as defences against ‘the midst of life’ and all its dramatic

possibilities. That is why, in the context of narratives of race,

ideologically inspired screen stories are ethically flawed, for they do

not acknowledge the racial other as possessing authentic subjectivity, only as representing difference. Character-driven screen stories, such as those I have written for this study, rest on the premise not of difference but of strangeness, of the deep mystery that we all are to each other and to ourselves. This is not simply a narrative premise for

My Australian Story and The Rushworth War, but a quality of my own lived experience within a multiethnic culture and within an intercultural family. As Julia Kristeva has noted:

Strangely, the foreigner lives within us…By recognising him within

ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself…The foreigner

comes in when the consciousness of my own difference arises, and he

disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners,

unamenable to bonds and communities. (1991, p.1)

I undertook this study out of my frustration and discomfort with

Australian films that so easily assumed both a white subjectivity in

their audience and an allied complicity with a belief in the superiority of an Anglo-Celtic core culture. This study has been an attempt to imagine an Australian screen culture that acknowledges the complex intersubjectivity a multicultural society like our own produces, not in

its official guise, but in the everyday experience of its individual

citizens. Such a screen culture would have no place for clichés about

the Japanese, or about any other race, only a limitless curiosity about

the possibilities within intercultural dialogue for transformation, and

an infinite variety of innovative narrative strategies for ‘telling’ this everyday drama.

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FILMS

Autumn Moon. 1992. Directed by C. Law. Stars Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Ka Fai. Produced by Teddy Robin Kwan. Bangkok Hilton. 1989. Directed by K. Cameron. Stars Nicole Kidman, Denham Elliott, Hugo Weaving. Kennedy Miller Productions. Breaker Morant. 1980. Directed by B. Beresford. Stars Edward Woodward, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown. Produced by Matt Carroll. Echoes of Paradise. 1987. Directed by P. Noyce. Stars Wendy Hughes, John Lone, Steve Jacobs. Produced by Jane Scott. Farewell China. 1990. Directed by C. Law. Stars Masatoshi Nagase, Pui-Wai Li. Produced by Eddie Fong and Clara Law. Gallipoli. 1981. Directed by P. Weir. Stars Mel Gibson, Mark Lee. Produced by Pat Lovell and Robert Stigwell. Goddess of 1967, The. 2000. Directed by C. Law. Stars Rose Byrne, Rikiya Kurokawa. Produced by Eddie Fong. Heaven’s Burning. 1997. Directed by C. Lahiff. Stars Russell Crowe, Yuki Kudoh, Ray Barrett. Produced by Al Clark and Helen Leake. Japanese Story. 2003. Directed by S. Brooks. Stars Toni Collette, Gotaro Tsunashima. Produced by Sue Maslin. Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.1983. Directed by N. Oshima. Stars Tom Conti, David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano. Produced by Jeremy Thomas. Romper Stomper. 1992. Directed by G. Wright. Stars Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock, Jacqueline McKenzie. Produced by Ian Pringle and Daniel Scharf. Secrets and Lies. 1996. Directed by M. Leigh. Stars Timothy Spall, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Brenda Blethyn. Produced by Simon Channing-Williams.

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Snow Falling in Cedars. 1999. Directed by S. Hicks. Stars Ethan Hawke, Yuki Kudoh. Produced by Ronald Bass, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Sunday Too Far Away.1975. Directed by K. Hannam. Stars Jack Thompson, Max Cullen. Produced by Matt Carroll. Turtle Beach.1992. Directed by S. Wallace. Stars Greta Scacchi, Joan Chen, Jack Thompson. Produced by Matt Carroll. Year of Living Dangerously, The. 1982. Directed by P. Weir. Stars Linda Hunt, Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver. Produced by Jim McElroy.

TELEVISION

Changi. 2001. Directed by K. Woods. ABC. Dreams of Leaving. 1980. Directed by D. Hare. BBC. Floating Life. 1996. Directed by C. Law. SBS.

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