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Australia's youth and awakening, raised on Kipling and led to the slaughterhouse. Farm lad (Mark Lee) and railroad laborer (Mel Gibson), sprinters both, joining the military in 1915 is one's patriotic duty and another's raffish adventure. "I'm gonna keep my head down, learn a trick or two, and... come back an officer." Getting to the Perth enlisting office is half the journey—the darkness of a freight car opens to the sun-blasted Outback, the camera pans and cranes to accommodate the endless horizon. (An old-timer on a camel knows nothing about the war, and shrugs when told the Huns might be coming to the desert: "They're welcome to it.") A burgeoning national identity still yoked to the motherland, thus an international epic with Peter Weir suspended between offbeat inquirer and academic craftsman. A training camp in Cairo, with rugby matches contemplated by the Sphinx and much roistering out of What Price Glory? "You Australians are crude, undisciplined, and the most ill-mannered soldiers I have ever encountered!" "Wait till you meet the New Zealanders." Boyish ideals, charge of the Light Horse, human tragedies. Waltzes at the officers' ball cut to boats on a nocturnal seascape illuminated by a rotating searchlight, a close-up of Gibson roused by explosions in his tent moves to an immense vista of the rocky Turkish coast dotted with shirtless servicemen. (Attenborough is the stylistic mainstay, under the staid surfaces lurk oneiric Weir moments like a passage of shrapnel turning blue waters crimson around nude swimmers.) "An English war, it's got nothing to do with us," Albinoni and electronic synthesizers weep for the unsuspecting cannon fodder. The stinger is the athlete trapped in a lethal freeze-frame, a scabrous parody of the runner's photo finish. Cinematography by Russell Boyd. With Bill Hunter, Robert Grubb, Bill Kerr, John Morris, Harold Hopkins, Tim McKenzie, and David Argue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |