‘Messy’ film documents screen legend’s dying wish

3 hours ago 4

Warning: This story contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.

FILM
Journey Home, David Gulpilil ★★★½
(PG) 88 minutes

It’s been almost four years since the death of the great Yolngu actor, dancer and storyteller David Gulpilil. His extraordinary film career began in his teens when he was “discovered” by the British director Nicolas Roeg, who cast him in a starring role in the 1971 drama Walkabout.

Gulpilil, who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, spent his last years primarily in the town of Murray Bridge, south of Adelaide. However, as his eldest son Jida Gulpilil testifies in this documentary, his dying wish was to be buried in accordance with tradition in his homeland of Gupulul in East Arnhem Land, near the sacred waterhole of Marayuwu, from which his spirit emerged.

It was a long and complex journey home for David Gulpilil’s remains.

As filmmakers Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas show us, making this happen was no simple matter. Gulpilil’s coffin was transported thousands of kilometres by plane, hearse and helicopter, following a complex route mapped out to allow as many as possible the chance to pay their last respects. Meanwhile, others in his extended family embarked on their own journeys to Gupulul from across the region and beyond.

Made at the request of Gulpilil’s relatives, the film follows this journey, starting in late 2021 when Gulpilil’s body was transported to an Arnhem Land mortuary, and culminating in the funeral itself, held in September 2022 following the end of the rainy season. In accordance with traditional protocol, this was a complex matter and involved rituals performed over 10 days in multiple locations.

Arriving at the final version of the film, which premiered in June at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, must have been another journey again. Whatever the material they wound up with originally looked like, Miles, Morton-Thomas and their editor Bill Murphy had some tricky questions to wrestle with.

David Gulpilil existed between two worlds.

To start with, there have already been a couple of documentaries about Gulpilil, including the 2021 My Name Is Gulpilil, where he speaks at length directly to the viewer.

What Journey Home, David Gulpilil seems meant to add to the portrait isn’t more information about his films, nor about his personal ups and downs. Rather, the goal is to return him to the cultural context from which he emerged – although, as we’re told in a variety of ways, his singular destiny was to exist between worlds, to the point where he was at home nowhere and everywhere.

As viewers, we might equally wonder exactly what audience is being addressed here, and by whom. There’s no straightforward answer, given that the filmmakers also come from different backgrounds: Morton-Thomas is an Anmatyerr woman from the Northern Territory, while Miles was born and raised in the UK.

As if mirroring this, the film has two alternating voiceover narrators: the Yolngu rapper Danzal Baker, otherwise known as “Baker Boy”, and Hugh Jackman, who bonded with Gulpilil on the set of Australia but speaks in the third person rather than as a friend.

By traditional standards of filmmaking craft, Journey Home, David Gulpilil is on the messy side: there are a lot of family members to keep track of, and the filmmakers too often fall back on stock “poetic” devices such as slow motion or drone shots of bushland.

Ultimately, a good deal of what’s shown is accessible to outsiders only to a point, despite the parallels Baker points out between Yolngu ceremony and showbiz rituals such as walking the red carpet.

The film is a bit all over the place, but perhaps that’s exactly how it should be – and however it’s judged as a documentary, as a document, it’s invaluable and moving.

Reviewed by Jake Wilson