FOUR AND A HALF STAR REVIEW IN THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

The Jammed

George Palathingal, reviewerAugust 30, 2007

As the story races on, the meaning of the film's title becomes harrowingly accurate.

Saskia Burmeister as Vanya, a woman subjected to sexual slavery in Jammed.


Drama
Run Time
89 minutes
Rated
MA 15+
Country
Australia
Director
Dee McLachlan
Actors
Emma Lung, Saskia Burmeister, Sun Park, Veronica Sywak
Rating
stars-4 half
You know from the start that this film isn't going to have a happy ending. The caption warning that it was inspired by Australian court transcripts is one clue; opening scenes involving a vacant-eyed Chinese prostitute being interrogated by immigration officers, and the frustrated white woman who turns up to help her, hammer the point home.
But in the world of dramatic cinema, happy endings can be overrated - and never more so than when the alternative is a film such as The Jammed. In a time when every other idiot seems to have a story to tell and, worse still, a wide variety of forums to clog up doing so, here's a tale actually worth telling. It doesn't hurt, either, that this film is so superbly put together.
The prostitute being questioned answers to the name of Crystal (Emma Lung, from Peaches) and it's her hellish Australian experience we flash back to see unfold. Crystal was sent to Sydney to sort out a family debt she thought she was going to pay off by dancing on tables. Having been brutally set straight, she is driven to an illegal Melbourne brothel to work off her debt along with two other young women in similar circumstances, the Russian Vanya (Saskia Burmeister) and the Chinese Rubi (Sun Park).
In a more affluent part of town, a glimmer of hope appears when a bored office worker named Ashley (Veronica Sywak) gets roped into giving a Chinese stranger a lift. This desperate older woman is looking for her missing daughter and, despite Ashley's instinct to mind her own business, her humanity gets the better of her and she gets drawn into the search. She'll confront many unpredictable scenarios in her quest to help, but ultimately how much can she help, if at all? As the story races on, the meaning of the film's title becomes harrowingly accurate.
That this film was made in Australia and mainly by natives (although writer-director Dee McLachlan is South African) is all well and good but really neither here nor there; what's important is that The Jammed will be revelatory and powerful to most audiences anywhere. It's dynamically lit and filmed and credibly acted, with an elegant score to boot, but there's much more to it than that. It isn't provocative for the sake of being provocative, nor is it merely some worthy exercise in politically correct filmmaking.
Sexual trafficking, modern slavery, call it what you want - the point is there's a terrifying amount of truth in what this film depicts.
Rarely do you come across a film that everyone could learn from