Anu Singh (Maggie Naouri) sits among a circle of fellow Australian National University law students at a Canberra backyard night-time party, jokily putting down another student. She is portrayed in this film as fragile at heart, with low self-esteem.
She turns to her boyfriend, Joe Cinque (Jerome Meyer): a fresh-faced young civil engineer from Newcastle. She grossly exaggerates a car accident he has been in.
“Babe,” he tells her, “you’re lying.”
Her eyes well up, perhaps because he has shamed her in company. “I’m just telling them how brave you were,” she says.
The real Joe Cinque is dead. It is day 25 of a six-week shoot for a new feature film, adapted from Helen Garner’s 2004 book about his killing, Joe Cinque’s Consolation.
Singh was convicted of manslaughter in 1999 and spent four years in jail after psychiatrists for her defence argued she had been mentally ill at the time of Cinque’s death in October 1997 and therefore had diminished responsibility.
Cinque apparently never had any idea he was in danger. His agonising death would take a day and a half, after Singh doped him with Rohypnol and plunged fatal doses of heroin into his arm.
The question that disturbed not only Garner but also everyone else who has encountered this grim, surreal story: with rumours circulating the couple’s dinner parties about Singh’s deadly intentions, why didn’t anybody go to the police to report her?
Singh’s friend Madhavi Rao even helped procure the drugs Singh used on Cinque and witnessed Cinque lying drugged on the floor on the Sunday morning he died, his lips turning blue. Yet Rao would be found not guilty of murder, and acquitted.
The only motivation Garner could attribute to Cinque’s killing was that he had recommended Singh consider a drug, ipecac, which models took to keep their weight down. Singh began taking the drug, then blamed Cinque for subsequent physical illness. Singh’s trial heard she had told another man she wanted to procure a gun or heroin, to commit suicide and kill Cinque.
Similarly to Garner’s book, this film, directed and cowritten by Sotiris Dounoukos, grapples with the moral, ethical and legal conundrum of what responsibility Singh and her law school friends should bear.
Dounoukos was also an ANU law student at the time, and knew both Singh and Cinque. He has spoken to Joe’s still-grieving parents, Nino and Maria, but refuses to say whether he has spoken to Singh for his film, though it seems unlikely. (Garner did not speak to Singh for the book, despite initial attempts to make contact.)
“Reading the book, even from [Garner’s] removed perspective as a viewer, her portrait of [Singh] was absolutely the person that we knew at law school,” Dounoukos says.
Clinical psychologist Dr Kenneth Byrne gave evidence for the defence in Singh’s trial that she had suffered “severe borderline personality disorder” since adolescence.
“What was driving her, I think, was a great deal of fear,” Dounoukos says, “and then very much the thing that drives people with borderline personality disorders: narcissism. People that are masters at entering and taking advantage of relationships, where there’s the narcissist and the enabler.
“Joe’s death sits within an extreme form of the kind of harm that those toxic relationships can lead to. Part of the tragedy is how oblivious he was to what was really happening.”
During her time in jail and since being released in 2001, Singh completed a masters in criminology at Sydney University with a thesis on the causes of female crime, including abuse, mental illness and drug use. In 2004, Radio National’s Phillip Adams asked Singh how she came to be the girl who killed Joe Cinque. “I think it started two years prior to the event occurring,” she answered. “I went through a traumatic breakup with a long-term boyfriend and I went into a fairly deep state of depression ... I was [also] going through a fairly significant eating disorder and then, of course, drug abuse on top of that.”
But Singh also told Adams: “I absolutely am responsible and take full responsibility for [Cinque’s death].”
Earlier this year, Singh told News Limited: “One of the psychiatrists mentioned a state of disassociation, perhaps, like disassociated from reality. I don’t know. There’s no rational explanation.”
Actor Maggie Naouri, who plays Singh, tried to avoid deep preconceptions. “I have to give myself the story as to why she saw the world like that, how come she was so sensitive. There’s a way she wants the world to see her and the way she is inside that’s very different. What are the triggers for that fragility?”
Producer Matthew Reeder describes the screenplay as watching a car crash in slow motion: you know a tragedy is going to happen. “But it’s the way you get to that disintegration that is so captivating. Sotiris has a very poetic visual style and a very precise screenplay.”
But, as Garner noted in her reporting of the trial, Singh’s story constantly hogged centre stage, at the expense of Cinque’s own story. Nino and Maria Cinque’s grief was never given form in court.
Garner’s interviews with the Cinque family attempted to bridge that gaping absence. So too does Meyer in his performance as Joe: Meyer was welcomed into the Cinque family home while researching the role and was even allowed to sit in Joe’s chair at the family dinner table.
Why did Joe stay with Singh? “As a young male, there was a sexuality she had that would have ensnared him,” Meyer says. “Also, he had a carer complex: that fed part of his character. He had this person who was weak and frail, and that would have made him feel very good about himself.”
Did Meyer get a sense Joe Cinque’s parents are at peace? “No way. I heard a quote one time: ‘Grief never goes away. It just changes.’ When you talk to Maria especially – Nino is very quiet – when Maria speaks, it’s all still in her voice. She holds herself beautifully and she never lets the conversation go to a place of aggression. But it’s all still there.”
• Joe Cinque’s Consolation opens in cinemas nationally on 13 October
