Paul Tournier (1898-1986) took the title of A Place for You from the promise in John 14: I go to prepare a place for you. His argument runs that a person needs a place before he can become a person, that the place is granted by others rather than achieved, and that life moves in two ordered stages, attachment then detachment. A man must possess a place before he can renounce one. Renunciation preached to the unplaced is cruelty, whatever the preacher intends. Tournier closed the book by conceding that every human place is provisional, and that a place does its work when it makes a man capable of trusting the place no committee administers, the one promised in the verse.
Bob Ellis (1942-2016) built The Nostradamus Kid (1992) out of the religion that took that verse more literally than any other body in Christendom. Seventh-day Adventism formed around a delayed place. Its founders expected Christ on October 22, 1844, stood in the fields waiting for the prepared place to arrive, and met the morning of October 23 instead. The movement survived its Great Disappointment by relocating the promise rather than surrendering it, and it has lived ever since as a community organized around imminence, teaching each generation that the end stands near and that no earthly place will hold. Ellis grew up inside it in northern New South Wales, called the film ninety-three percent his own life, and gave his stand-in, Ken Elkin (Noah Taylor, b. 1969), the formation to prove it.
Ken receives his place in a tent. The film opens in 1956 at an Adventist summer camp, canvas pitched for a season, a visiting evangelist, Pastor Anderson, preaching the end of the world to rows of families who will strike the tents and go home. Tournier’s inventory of place lists rooms, houses, pews, countries, things that stand while a child forms against them. The camp meeting is the Adventist form of place, and it folds by design. More than that, the place is located in time rather than space. What the sect grants its children is a position on a timetable: the last generation, the remnant, the people of the shortly-before. A boy raised there possesses no ground he is permitted to trust. The doctrine itself forbids the trust, since attachment to a passing world is the standing temptation and the world is always passing now.
The sect administers Tournier’s two movements in the wrong order, structurally, to everyone. Detachment is the catechism. The world ends soon, hold nothing tightly, the cities will fall, the faithful will flee to the hills. Children receive this before their first movement has run its course, renunciation issued to persons still waiting for possession. Ken at the camp is a boy being taught to surrender a world no one has yet given him. His response is the sane one. He asks heretical questions at prayer meetings and watches the preacher’s daughter instead of the pulpit, which is to say he reaches for the two places actually on offer to an adolescent, the mind and a girl, the only ground within arm’s length.
His departure follows, and Tournier’s test for departures asks whether a man leaves from possession or flees from want. Ken flees. By 1962 he is at Sydney University, writing for the student paper, scruffy and suddenly attractive, moving among atheists and Presbyterians, and the film plays his apostasy as appetite finding the exit. Nothing in this resembles the Abraham movement, the renunciation performed from strength. He never possessed the place he left. He was a tenant of a timetable, and he walked off the lease.
Then the film springs its trap. A man can leave a spatial place by traveling. A place located in time cannot be left that way, because it travels with the clock. In October 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis breaks, Kennedy speaks, and the apostate’s formation fires on schedule. Ken, who believes none of it, believes all of it in an afternoon. Sydney will burn. The end has come, as promised in the tent. And what he does next is the film’s sharpest stroke, sharper than its comedy admits. The sect he abandoned kept a script for this exact hour: when the end nears, leave the cities. Ken performs the script. He insists that Jennie O’Brien (Miranda Otto, b. 1967), the newspaper editor’s daughter he has been courting against her father’s wishes, drive him out of Sydney in her father’s car, across the mountains, in search of ground the fallout will not reach. An unbeliever executing his church’s eschatological drill in a borrowed car, fleeing a judgment he officially denies, toward hills his childhood assigned him.
Jennie was a place in formation, the central adult instance of the grant, a person offering ground against her own father’s disapproval. The drive over the mountains ends the relationship. The old place, never possessed and never renounced, reaches forward through the timetable and demolishes the new place while it is still setting. This is the engine under the film’s nostalgia: an unfinished first movement occupies the site where every later place tries to build. The women in series, the restlessness, the wit deployed as armor, all the strong reactions in Tournier’s ledger, cover a single weakness, a boy’s instilled certainty that no ground holds and heaven audits the waiting. When the crisis comes, the strong reactions collapse in hours and the oldest weak one, flight, takes the wheel.
The coda shows the personage complete. Elkin, now a successful playwright with a work on at the Opera House, crosses paths with childhood friends. The credentials are in order, the platform national, and behind the personage stands, unchanged, the kid from the tent. Tournier held that the person appears in dialogue, when the mask lowers before another, and the film grants Elkin no such scene. It grants him narration instead, an older voice circling the material at forty years’ distance, and the circling extends past the frame of the story. Ellis spent a decade trying to get the film made. The film is the return: a man rebuilds the tent at feature length and walks strangers through it, row by row, sermon by sermon. Tournier wrote about patients who circle a lost place for decades and call the circling by other names. Some call it art.
Surveying a 1962 in which atomic war has put the end of the world into every newspaper, Ken tells his girl the Adventists prevailed after all: “We won, didn’t we?” The joke carries the diagnosis outward. The nuclear age installed the sect’s temporal condition in the general population. Whole cities now held their places under a timetable, attachment shadowed by the schedule of missiles, and the boy formed for that condition found himself, for one October, the sanest man in Sydney, or the least surprised. Tournier wrote for individual patients, but his terms scale: a civilization can also be talked out of trusting its ground, and it will produce Ken Elkins in quantity, fluent, charming, provisionally attached to everything.
The church that raised Ken Elkin held, in doctrine, the same final position Tournier held, that every earthly place is provisional and the true place is prepared elsewhere. Where it failed him is in the order. Tournier’s rule runs support first, then surrender, the land before the leaving, and the tent taught a child surrender while he was still waiting for the land. The film forgives almost everyone, which is its temperament, and the frame is under no such obligation. It notes the two dates on either side of the man, 1844 and 1962, a disappointed morning and a spared one, and between them a formation that left a boy unable to keep the girl, keep the faith, or keep away.
