Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

Her father in the film is brave and caring, innocent of any wrong. He offers himself as a sacrifice, leads Yia Pao in an escape, then is the first of them to cross a swollen river. Maggie would like to believe that this is the man her father became in the jungle, but she can’t. He sat at a desk or in front of a TV all his life. How natural it would have been for him to stay in the pit as ordered. It probably wasn’t courage that drove him out but the sight of Yia Pao clambering away from him with the baby in one arm. It was probably a terror of being left there on his own.

The documentarian has filmed a fantasy, a fake, one that’s all the more offensive for having been made with a technical skill Maggie envies. This woman wanted a saint, so she created one; she boiled down the last week of Gordon Dunne’s life to a few minutes of action. No wonder she was content to leave the farm so quickly. She had probably come up here hoping for footage of drugs and orgies. How disappointing to discover only a few acres of trees and a single abandoned woman.

Then the scene changes, and the person looking back at Maggie from the television set is Gran, the genuine one, sitting in the parlour of her house in Syracuse, though the room is brighter than usual and Gran looks different too, all made up and her hair newly permed. When did they shoot this footage? Gran never breathed a word about it. Maggie watches and listens as Gran talks about her son, describing a devout boy with his eyes upon the Lord. While she speaks, the screen shows photographs of him as a child, then as a teenager. Finally there’s one of him holding a newborn baby, though he looks not much older than a boy himself. As the screen lingers on the image and the voice-over tells of him becoming a father, Maggie realizes the baby is her. She has never seen photographs of herself at that age, because neither her father nor Gran kept any in the house. Maggie always assumed they didn’t wish to be reminded of her mother’s bad end. Now, as she looks at the photograph, she notices something. Her father’s neck. It isn’t covered by a high collar. There isn’t any scar to hide. But that doesn’t make any sense, because Maggie was born three years after the war.

Before she has time to contemplate what this means, the film leaps forward, gaining colour and motion. Onscreen, a young Lao man with an empty shirt sleeve is gesturing down a track of trampled, slimy-looking undergrowth. The voice-over says it’s the trail her father took after making his escape. The surrounding forest is darker and more riotous than in her dreams.

In the next shot, they show the trap that caught him. The young man explains the mechanism while a translator interprets what he says. Apparently the trap wasn’t set for her father in particular, just for any poor soldier making his way through that territory. They don’t even know who set it, whether it was someone from the Hmong army or the Pathet Lao. There’s a cut to a shaky hand-held shot moving down the trail, as if from her father’s perspective, then a close-up of three barbed prongs driven through a slender strip of bamboo. The voice-over describes the tripwire, the spring action, and the fact that the trap was designed to be so excruciatingly painful as to make freeing oneself impossible. When the screen returns to the hand-held shot, Maggie feels a throb of anticipation. Surely they won’t show it. They mustn’t. But they do.

She watches a foot catch on a wire stretched across the ground. Then a shot of the camera swinging wildly toward him, as though propelled by some elastic force. A moment later, standing before Maggie’s eyes is her father, pinned against a tree. The whip trap has caught him just below the ribs. The baby in his arms looks toward the wound as if it understands profoundly what has transpired. A dribble of blood travels down her father’s shirt. The man still has his salt-and-pepper beard, still is not her father, yet somehow now he is. The scene has been lit to resemble certain paintings of martyred saints, all deep shadows and alabaster skin, so that he has an appalling beauty. It shouldn’t bother her as much as it does; she already knows most of the details from the priest at the mission. The sight of him is different, though. The sight is obscene.

The shot goes on for hours, as if the filmmaker is determined that Maggie absorb every detail, every nuance of pain and impossible ecstasy on his face, as if she wants Maggie to feel the sensations with him. Finally there’s a release that her father was never granted, and the scene changes to a medical office, where a physician testifies that shock must have been what kept Gordon Dunne from moving during those last hours; his lack of struggle must have kept him alive. The doctor says it’s highly unusual for a man to survive that long after such a wound. Then the doctor is replaced by the priest from the mission, who says it had to be a miracle, because no power but God’s could have kept Gordon upright all that time and still able to protect his young charge.

The documentarian seems out to prove her objectivity, but Maggie isn’t fooled. The woman wants to believe in Gordon Dunne’s holiness. Now it’s clear why she came to visit the farm. She knew he didn’t get the scar on his neck from the war, so she wanted Maggie to clear up the mystery, to affirm or sully him, to steer her out of doubt. Maggie wonders what the woman would say if she knew about the roll of bills in the clay statue. Would that be enough for her to lose her faith, or would she think of the money as another miracle?

In the kitchen, the telephone has started ringing. Maggie thinks she’ll just ignore it, but then she remembers what time it is and realizes it could be George Ray phoning from Jamaica, already breaking their agreement not to call.

When she reaches the kitchen and picks up, it’s Father Josef. He tells her that on television there’s a programme she should be watching.

“Yes, I’m doing that already,” she says. Stretching the cord back down the hall, she can just see the TV through the living room doorway. It’s unnerving to think that the priest has been viewing the same things she has.

“Is touching, yes?” he says.

“I didn’t need to be touched.”

“No, of course,” he replies quickly. “I was only thinking you might wish to know.”

She asks him if Lenka’s watching too, and he says she went to bed a long time ago. Onscreen, there’s another shot of the river that carried away Yia Pao, and the documentarian’s voice-over admits that his being swept downstream is only speculation, that no one knows what has become of him since he was kidnapped. The whereabouts of his son are also uncertain. The people who found the baby in the arms of Maggie’s father know only that the child was taken to an orphanage somewhere.

The priest has been speaking in Maggie’s ear. What is he talking about? With her eyes still on the television screen, she tries to comprehend him. Then she hears him refer to the money. Suddenly he has all her attention.

“You must forgive Lenka for telling me,” he says. “She is worried about you.”

The treachery runs through her like poison.

“You talk of going to police, yes?” says Josef. “I think this is wise.” Is he making a threat? He could have told the police already. She wants to say it’s none of his business. “No doubt,” he continues, “they will say the money is yours to do with how you wish.” But his tone seems odd. It’s as if he’s trying to hint at some possibility.

“What would you wish me to do with it?” she asks.

“Me? Is not question of my wishes.” He waits a beat. “Perhaps, though, is question of your father’s.”

“What would he want, then?” she says, feeling lifeless.

“Maybe he wants it given to Church.”