The Last Wave complicate the distinction between European and Indigenous Peoples on narrative, aesthetic, and ideological levels:
The film goes back and forth between the judicial process of the colonizers and the tribal laws of the aboriginals, showing how the murder case is complicated amid two law systems. We are invited to piece together the truth with both the information we get through the lawyer and the tribal wall painting we see in the end, but these two sources of information are scrambled together, so that we can’t differentiate them. There are many scenes and images in the film that suggest this intermingling. When it rains heavily outside, which the aboriginals take as an apocalyptic sign, the lawyer’s house is also flooded with tub water. There is an interesting image early in the film where a man on the street drinks water from a tab while holding an umbrella to shield him from rainwater, suggesting the hypocrisy or ludicrousness of differentiating between the two kinds of water. The lawyer’s dream or fantasy are intercutted with real scenes to blur the line between reality and imagination, but also between the colonizers’ world of rationality and the aboriginals’ world of tribal mysteries. The aboriginal beliefs finally influence the lawyer’s recognition of self, thus fully creeping into the colonizers’ world.
However, The Last Wave still maintains dominant cultural hierarchies.
The social statuses of the colonizers and the aboriginals are not equal, with the white protagonist being a respectable lawyer, having decent suits… etc. The lawyer and his family also take up more theatrical space and time, with most stories and fantasies happening in THEIR house or THEIR court, allowing them to “play a home game” and making it easier for audience to identify with them. The reverse only happens intermittently and in the end, when the lawyer no longer has control over his own house. Over the course, only the lawyer has the ability to freeze the narrative and make us ascent into his inner world, like fantasy or dreams. The ending is an example, where we the lawyer’s meditation concludes the whole story. It’s also interesting to me that even at the end, I think the audience are still not sure of what really happens. The aboriginal culture remains a “dark continent” or a mystery, open to (colonizers’) exploration and objectification.
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