It might be said, particularly by Philip French if he were here, that these two factions are at loggerheads…įrom then on, the film steadily develops, opening out at the same time as Martin catches sight of the magnificent wilderness stretching before him.
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Soon, though, he's off into the hills to track his prey, assisted by a kindly enough neighbour called Jack Mindy (Sam Neill) who has taken it upon himself to look in on the Armstrong children regularly.Įn route to the forests, Martin and Jack encounter environmental protesters – the "greenies" – and loggers, workers on practically the only industry in the island's interior. Martin sets about restoring power and water to the dwelling, necessitating more contact with the children than we feel he would like. Jarrah's wife, Lucy (Frances O'Connor), lies comatose with grief and barbiturates in her bed while her two children, Sass and Bike, run almost feral around the wooden building and its muddy outhouses. After a hostile reception at the local pub, where he's told "we don't like greenies around here", Martin finds lodgings at the ramshackle house of another university researcher, Jarrah Armstrong, who has been missing for months.
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However, arriving in a small logging town in Tasmania, Dafoe assumes the alias of Martin David, and claims to be sent from "the university" as part of a field study into the behaviour of Tasmanian devils. I was even reminded of George Clooney's recent gunsmith in The American. He has all the traditional film hallmarks of an assassin and we're clearly supposed to think of him as such, one in the mould of Edward Fox's Jackal perhaps, or Jean Reno's Léon, with loner tendencies and precision instruments. It is unclear what Dafoe's character does for a living. Willem Dafoe, an actor we see all too rarely in lead roles, is superb as the titular hunter, hired by a dubious biotech corporation to track down the Tasmanian tiger, a fox-like creature thought to have been extinct since the 1930s. Thankfully, where Sleeping Beauty was all cold, hard stares in airless rooms, The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, is glorious in its widescreen, weather-lashed treatment of the great outdoors. Not to be confused with Steve McQueen's last film of the same name (although I'm sure echoes are intended), it's based on a book by Julia Leigh, the writer who made her own debut as a film-maker at Cannes in 2011 with the neo-feminist erotic curio Sleeping Beauty. The latest of these is The Hunter, an Australian film set entirely in one of the last great wildernesses, Tasmania. From the great explorer films of the early years such as The Lost World and King Kong, through to westerns, and later classics such as The Deer Hunter and White Hunter Black Heart, directors have used nature and the chase to depict man confronting his inner self, wrestling with his wild ego and his civilised id. Needless to say, his decision was not taken well by the hunters, who had plenty of mouths of their own to feed - both old and young.H unting is a longstanding metaphor in the movies. The magistrate decreed that henceforth, she would have a small share of profits from the kill of each tiger by the hunters. She went and implored the magistrate to provide her with compensation for the loss of her son, who was her only source of support. During a snowstorm, Chen Ma's son was separated from his fellow hunters and became food for a hungry tigress.Īfter her initial shock and grief subsided, Chen Ma took stock of her own utterly desperate situation - an old woman left all alone. His share of the profits from the sale of tiger skins, meat and bones was sufficient to keep the small mud hut well provisioned for himself and his old mother.Īll was well until a particularly bitter winter.
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Her son was one of the tiger hunters licensed by the local magistrate, following the same profession of his father and grandfather before him. Once there was an elderly widow, Chen Ma, who lived with her only son inside a forest in the Shanxi Province.