John Hillcoat's The Proposition is one of the better Australian feature films to have gotten a release in the last couple of years. Like Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, it's a compelling, if occasionally problematic, Australian western that concerns itself both with a number universal themes, such as brotherhood, trust, and betrayal, and with more specific cultural and historical concerns, such as the violence, anarchy, and genocidal racism that are inherent in colonisation in general and the British colonisation of Australia in particular.

This slightly schizophrenic desire to be universal to the point of mythology while simultaneously being targeted and specific is one of the film's key aspects. It often feels like Hillcoat has added a lot of the more detailed historical stuff (such as the archival material that appears in the film's opening and end credits), the vast majority of which concerns itself with the oppression of indigenous Australians by white settlers, to a story by Nick Cave that, like much of his music, is ultimately more concerned with big, timeless, universal themes. The result is a strange sort of structural tension that finds a number of equivalents all throughout the film.

These two approaches, so seemingly disparate in nature, can certainly be reconciled, though often with unstable and jarring results. The film's overall style and tone is testament to this. Just as the boundaries between universal and specific themes are dissolved, to greater or lesser extent, so too are those that supposedly exist, in both the frame and in the narrative, between outside and inside, beast and man, anarchy and civilisation, and freedom and imprisonment. The photography, editing, and music respond to this in kind. There's something not quite right about the way the film's been shot and edited. It's not comforting, not traditionally beautiful, not at all like a period drama is supposedly supposed to be. It's confusing, strange, full of weird framing choices and visual rhythms, full of musical themes, composed by Cave, that change dramatically, violently, jarringly, constantly, from scene to scene and sequence to sequence.

Towards the beginning of the film, Ray Winstone, who gives an absolutely stunning performance (one of many in the picture), asks of Australia, "What fresh hell is this?" Audiences, with any luck, will hopefully ask the same thing of The Proposition, which I think will catch many people off-guard, so frequently and deliberately and disorientatingly indefinable is subject and its style. If nothing else (and there's much more to be said, particularly about the acting), both thematically and formally, the film quivers with the violent unpredictability of the frontier. It quivers in a way that few Australian films have quivered. This is a very good thing.

BIFF World Cinema Club e-bulletin, Iss. 1, 21 November 2005