What if instead of a married couple, the group of friends on a yacht for a holiday in Phillip Noyce’s 1989 classic Dead Calm were alone in the boat? What if instead of meeting a psychotic Billy Zane way out in the middle of nowhere, the Australians came across a sinking and broken boat filled with asylum seekers in the middle of the Timor Sea? What if the group faced the tough decision of whether to pull the desperate people in, which would endanger both boats or warn the Indonesian authorities, which would leave them stranded?
The SBS four-part drama Safe Harbour has an altogether different premise from the ABC Seven Types of Ambiguity wherein the drama is initiated by a single event between a complex web of relations between the characters. Unlike Ambiguity, Safe Harbour (under the showrunner Belinda Chayko) has a burning political issue at its core which deeply intertwines the political and personal issues.
Nonetheless, this exceptional series sure to be one of the remarkable Australian television events of the year is not a dramatized version of the emotional Chasing Asylum. Glendyn Ivin who directed the show together with the writers Chayko, Matt Cameron, Phil Enchelmaier, work tirelessly on setting themsleves apart as dramatists and not polemicists. They are more interested in chewing on large, complex ideas and exploring ethical grey areas. The series does not revolve around commending or condemning people.
Safe Harbour opens with a group of holidaymakers gathered on the yacht, enjoying great weather and discussing liquid lunches. Ryan(Ewen Leslie) and his wife Bree(Leeanna Walsman), Damien(Joel Jackson) his girlfriend Olivia(Phoebe Tonkin) plus a mutual friend Helen(Jacqueline McKenzie) are all on the boat. While the group does come to a mutual decision to help the asylum seekers, it is once again made clear that it is not the most important aspect of the show. The group decides to act but it is realized there are some problems.
There is no rescue or proud assimilation angle that undeniably stains the auras of the refugees and Australians which is often observed in ordinary narratives. Photograph SBS
The story then flashes forward a couple of years. Ryan gets into a taxi with Ismail (Hazem Shammas), and to his surprise, he recognizes Ismail from the boat he traveled in. Ryan is delighted to see Ismail, and when he invites him to lunch, it is clear that he is eager to meet the rest of their family, meaning his wife Zahra (Nicole Chamoun, the best part of Stan’s Romper Stomper series), and brother: Bilal (Robert Rabiah). At the dinner table, Zahra collapses and screams at the table about some loss that took place in the ocean.
The flashbacks tell us of their journey to Australia and it is divided across the four episodes. The journey is far from simple and painless. It is anything but the overly heroic ideal of white people saving the rest of the world or refugees exchanging their identities for a smile.
Ewen Leslie along with the rest of the cast delivers a nuanced and engrossing performance. Photograph SBS
Like the critically acclaimed film from 2003, House of Sand and Fog, where Ben Kingsley portrayed a colonel in the Iranian army and Jennifer Connelly a drug addict in San Francisco, drives the viewer’s attention towards the ‘what if’ scenario and not focus on the racial drama of the series. Who is right does not matter as much as how they choose to react under pressure and what that says about their decisions. And no, humanity is what lies at the center of it all.
The entire cast gives spectacular performances beginning with Leslie who gives a complex and incredibly engrossing performance. It would be fair to state his character is the one who represents the affluent, reasonably well-off white Australian citizens and Shammas portrays the new refugee to Australia embroiled in this deep-rooted drama. But again, it’s complicated. There are profound unresolved events before and after this which create ripple effects across time and void of a bridge to float on.
Ivin, who made the great 2012 cross-country drama Last Ride, balances a complex and psychological drama that never takes an incendiary or black-and-white position. This is a series that depicts the conflicts in life, and life in this context can best be understood as conflict. Sam Chiplin’s fine and immersive cinematography depicts his immersion in the story and the character’s color graded system, which is almost devoid of color, represents conflict straining the grey areas.
As tension builds and stakes are enhanced, it is part of the message that criminals might be ordinary people, and normal people do criminal things. On the other hand legal definitions do not carry the weight of moral reasoning, but moral choices can be painfully subjective. And in a world where there is no one looking for challenges, the difference between seeking action and seeking reaction determines us. The world’s best and greatest themes: love, pity, and humanity are explored by Ivin and his team.
There’s lots to analyze in Safe Harbour, on par with Australia’s best multicultural dramas like Sunshine from last year and The Principal from 2015. The myriad twists and subplots are intertwined beautifully, with a level of sophistication and tension. Several scenes end with an ellipsis. Rather than feeling disjointed, the non-chronological timeline feels stunningly captivating, as if watching a slow revealing of a constructed puzzle.
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