The Transit Lounge

The film is essentially a two-hander between a broken down, drunk and dispirited old veteran, Jack (Jai Koutrae), and Masaru (Shingo Usami), a lost Japanese soldier who has escaped internment. Debut director Brad Haynes engages flashbacks of Jack’s WWI trench experiences – when he was unable to mercy-kill his best mate – in an effort to broker commonality with Japanese soldiers like Masaru, who are ordered to avoid capture by any means, expressly including suicide; and the pair do indeed come to an uneasy truce.

With landscape photography vigorous enough to qualify as its own character and an ear for subtly within the taciturn Australiana spoken by Jack, Haynes has constructed a local history film at once stark and comprehensive, unpretentious but expansive. Jack’s is a world wherein fate is so obstinate and wilfully disruptive that not even a hermitic existence on the edge of civilisation can escape it.

The Cowra Breakout is a story of reconciliation and understanding. As Masaru’s inexorable end attests, even against such stacked odds the simplest of human compassions can cut through, scaling the divide between desolation and deliverance.

Brian Duff is the staff writer for FilmInk Magazine.