JM (Rikiya Kurokawa), a young Japanese salesman, leads a solitary, uneventful life in Tokyo, his only company a couple of rare snakes. But he dreams of owning a very special car - a late 1960s Citroën, the legendary model DS (in French: Déesse, or "Goddess") via the internet, he makes contact with a potential seller and flies to Australia to close the deal.
At the airport, however, his contact is nowhere to be seen, and when JM goes to visit him at his home, he finds the man and his wife dead, apparently after an argument over money, and a young blind girl - BG (Rose Byrne) - guarding a small child. She invites the visitor to test drive the DS; he does, and is at once seduced. The car, BG explains, was not actually the dead man's to sell - but, she adds, she can take him to meet the real owner. JM agrees, and together these two isolated souls embark on a journey that will take them deep into the Australian outback and also into their own pasts.
For BG, it means recalling her troubled, ultimately tragic relationship with her mother, reliving a violent teenage encounter with a young boxer and, finally, confronting her aging, abusive grandfather. For JM, it means entering an alien landscape, a harsh and frequently hostile world - all the while fleeing a painful memory that forced him to leave Japan. Before long, their separate quests become one: a shared desire to transcend the past and find redemption, achieved under the benevolent eye of the goddess.
|
Cast :
Crew : (when available)
Cast : (when available)
