‘The Stars Are All Strange ’ Here

Inspired by the long-overlooked history of the cameleers who journeyed from Afghanistan and beyond to haul supplies across the late-nineteenth-century Australian outback, Roderick MacKay’s debut feature paints a complicated portrait of the country’s colonial past. In its tale of ill-gotten gold, racial animus and displacement, the film is a thematically unique – if, in other respects, somewhat conventional – instalment in a new wave of Australian westerns, writes Jessica Kiang.

Over the long and storied history of the movie western, there have been hundreds of night-time campfire scenes. Usually signalling a lull in the linear action of the narrative, these moments are rarely the most emblematic of the films they’re in and – with the possible exception of Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974) – rarely the most immediately remembered. And yet they are often the most deeply revealing of a film’s subtler textures and psychologies, as though it takes nightfall to blind the characters to the vastness of landscapes that crush them to insignificance, to wrap them in a darkened cloak of intimacy, allowing the blossoming of thoughts and dreams that would burn away to nothing under the hot sun. So it is in Roderick MacKay’s fine, stirring Australian (or ‘meat pie’) western The Furnace, in which the majority of the action – gold grubbing, gunfights and grisly death – takes place during the day, in the arid, fly-swarmed desert outback, but also in which, for just a moment, two characters stray from a companionable circle of firelight one evening and have a short, quiet conversation, about homesickness and how the stars look wrong. It could be a lonesome cowboy ballad, except both are wearing turbans, and they speak Pashto.

THE THREE-WAY ENTANGLEMENT BETWEEN CINEMA, THE