LIFE IS cheap in The Proposition, a starkly beautiful revenger’s tragedy scripted by the poet laureate of romantic fatalism, Nick Cave. Set against the murderous violence of the Australian outback in the 1880s, director John Hillcoat’s highly anticipated “bushranger western” marks the 48-year-old rocker’s solo-screenwriting debut.

The Proposition stars Guy Pearce and Danny Huston as murderous Irish outlaw brothers whose lives become lethally entangled with a troubled British police captain and his sexually frustrated wife, played by Ray Winstone and Emily Watson. Steeped in the same heady mix of poetic melancholy and bruise-black humour that stalks his lyrical hinterland, Cave’s vision of 19th-century Australia as a lawless purgatory also recalls the blasted Old Testament backdrop of his 1989 gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel.

It is, Cave insists, a deeply Australian story. “What we didn’t want was the American-style hero. There’s a certain incompetence, a humour almost, that exists in the Australian character today, which comes out of people being where they probably shouldn’t be. Certainly this film is about an isolated community, people struggling in a place where they really have no right to be.”

Cave composed the score to The Proposition with Warren Ellis, the violinist, multi-instrumentalist and member of his band the Bad Seeds. And various lyrics are woven into the fabric of the story. “I always heard it musically, and I guess it’s written rhythmically as well,” the singer explains. “It’s very similar to the way my band operates. There are moments of intense violence and there are also moments of long, lyrical, quiet sadness.”

But Cave makes a clear distinction between composing a film soundtrack and recording with the Bad Seeds.

“I didn’t want to have songs in it, or Nick Cave songs certainly,” he nods. “For me it was a delicately balanced thing. The soundtrack is very much a record that we tried to make stand up on its own. You can listen to it without having to see the film.”

With The Proposition, Cave quips, he and Hillcoat have completed their “men behaving badly” trilogy. Besides working together on several Bad Seeds videos, the singer has previously co-scripted and acted in Hillcoat’s 1988 prison lock-down thriller Ghosts... of the Civil Dead. He co-wrote the soundtrack to Hillcoat’s 1996 tale of doomed romance To Have and Have Not.

“I guess in all these films there is a sense that morality is a luxury that we can afford in less fraught times,” Cave says. “But in extreme situations and extreme environments morality becomes a very grey issue.”

Shot in hellish summer heat in the Queensland desert, The Proposition is an uncomfortable film to watch at times. The sense of European frontier settlers stuck in a place where they were never meant to be, suffering inhuman conditions as a result, bleeds from every filthy, fly-blown frame. The parched outback moonscapes certainly appear more inhospitable than any Hollywood western.

“I think for Johnny Australia had its western story as well,” Cave explains. “It had its Wild West, and that hadn’t been exploited cinematically at all. There weren’t genre films being made about that period unless they were biopics of famous Australians — the Ned Kelly story, the Mad Dog Walker story or whatever. So this was a rich mine to plumb.”

The film also delves into the ugly racial politics of the era. The brutal tribal tensions between colonial Brits and Irish outlaws, white settlers and Aboriginals has never been so exhaustively explored on screen before.

“Johnny wanted a different take on the way Aboriginals are usually treated in Australian films,” Cave nods, “a different take to the liberal view that’s thrust upon them, where they just stood around and allowed themselves to be wiped out. The idea that they didn’t resist, that they were a nonaggressive race and they didn’t put up a fight.”

Featuring a large Aboriginal cast, The Proposition certainly takes an axe to liberal pieties about Australia’s past. “That was the thing that the indigenous actors were really pleased about,” Cave says. “To be in a film where they got an opportunity to fight back.”

Already a published author, internationally revered songwriter and electrifying performer, Cave adds another string to his bow with The Proposition. Like much of his work, it is ultimately a hymn to the power of love and redemption. But to anyone unfamiliar with the singer’s bloodthirsty murder ballads, its scenes of jarring brutality and sexually charged carnage may come as a shock.

Ironically, Cave is no fan of screen violence. “A lot of it I find tiring, boring,” he says. “Almost as boring as sex on the screen. We made an attempt not to exhaust the audience through having to sit through some sort of horror show, blood and guts,for two hours. The violent episodes are necessary for the thrust of the story, and they are just punctuation points between a fairly meditative, slow kind of film.

“For the type of film it is, and the period it’s set in, I personally found the violence quite restrained. It could have been pure carnage.”

The Proposition is the MTV Special Screening, showing on Oct 26 & 27 at Odeon West End 2. Nick Cave and John Hillcoat discuss the film on Oct 27 at NFT1


CAVE DWELLING

MUSICIAN
Fronted Melbourne garage-punks the Birthday Party in the late 1970s, then formed the Bad Seeds in London in the early 1980s.

AUTHOR
His novel And the Ass Saw the Angel received rave reviews in 1989. He has also published two books of collected lyrics.

ACTOR
A small role alongside Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede and a violent prisoner in John Hillcoat’s Ghosts . . . of the Civil Dead.

SONGWRITER FOR HIRE
His songs have appeared in numerous films, including Wings of Desire, Scream and Shrek 2. He has also written for Marianne Faithfull and Ute Lemper.

FESTIVAL CURATOR
Hosted the Meltdown festival on the South Bank in 1999. Jarvis Cocker, Arvo Pärt, Germaine Greer and Nina Simone featured in the line-up.

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