Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner

Maggie Naouri’s portrayal of Anu is the more difficult task, as her personality defies all stereotypes. We see Joe at work, and eavesdrop on conversations he has with friends. Jerome Meyer plays Joe as an easy-going, likeable guy, devoted to his difficult girlfriend. The film takes pains to bring Joe Cinque alive in a way never attempted in the book. It’s a story that gets weirder and more disturbing by degrees, until you want to yell: “What’s the matter with these people!? Why are they so passive at the thought of suicide and murder?” Soon we are in flashback mode, tracing the history of the fatal relationship as if it were a mildly diverting soap opera. We begin in October 1997 with Anu’s garbled 000 call that summoned an ambulance when Joe was already too far gone.

He has replaced Garner’s highly subjective approach with the would-be objectivity of a documentarist. There is little room for the parents of Joe and Anu, and their contrasting forms of pain. In bringing the story to the screen, Dounoukos has removed the authorial tone and the accounts of the trials of Anu Singh and her friend, Madhavi Rao. The tale unfolds like a bad dream, with every character apparently incapable of the most basic sense of empathy. We feel as if we are discovering the facts at the same time as the writer, with the same mixture of shock and revulsion. It is this insistent, questioning voice that makes the book so compelling. We share the author’s sympathies for the victim’s family, and her bewilderment at the workings of the law.

She makes us party to her own fears and recriminations her battles to be fair to Joe’s girlfriend, Anu Singh, who injected him with a lethal dose of heroin. In the best-selling book about the death of 26-year-old Joe Cinque and the murder trial that followed, we see everything through Garner’s eyes. Notably absent from Sotiris Dounoukos’s film, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, is the voice of Helen Garner.

Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner