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The hallucinatory opening consciously advances upon Picnic at Hanging Rock, rumbling on a cloudless sky segues into window-smashing rain and hail for terrified schoolchildren. (The scene passes from The Birds to The Last Days of Pompeii.) A tribal killing in Sydney, the victim's heart "just stopped beating," the lawyer who specializes in "corporate taxation" (Richard Chamberlain) takes on the case. Among the Aboriginal accused is the man in his recurring nightmare (David Gulpilil), carrying sacred stones and oracular pronouncements. The limits of rationality in the face of a procession of Return of the Oppressed abstractions, "it is death to know them," Peter Weir attunes the mise en scène to the protagonist's white guilt and anxiety. There's a desert beneath the asphalt, naturally the presiding element is water—rain, lawn sprinklers, leaking faucets and roofs, the bathtub overflow that balefully descends the staircase step by step. (By contrast, middle-class order is represented via a backyard barbecue with Anglican Old Stepdad.) "A shadow of something real," dreaming, thus a vision of drowning pedestrians imagined through the widescreen of a windshield. The shamanic elder (Nandjiwarra Amagula) is "some sort of otherness" in all its shifting shapes, painter, wily owl, sinister POV tracking shot, awkward dinner guest. A plague of frogs, a downpour of oil, a free-floating miasma of environmental unease. Parallel worlds à la Tourneur, the attorney's investigation braids them by discovering that he may be a clairvoyant spirit linked to ancient folklore. Weir sorts things out in the caves under the city, with hieroglyphs and slow-motion and the sudden growl of a didgeridoo. "I think I've got to dispel a few rather romantic notions you seem to have." The ending stems unmistakably from Zabriskie Point. Cinematography by Russell Boyd. With Olivia Hammett, Frederick Parslow, Viviean Gray, and Peter Carroll.
--- Fernando F. Croce |