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The title is the folkloric incantation that stands in the way of mining tractors. "Why the fuck can't they dream somewhere else?" Werner Herzog looks for hills on the Australian Outback, and finds them—mounds of white construction dirt dot the desert floor as sacred aboriginal grounds are dynamited for uranium. Tribe elders (Wandjuk and Roy Marika) sit impassively before bulldozers, the machines muscle up but halt at the last minute, the men dust off and calmly move their resistance a few feet away. Bribes from the company can't keep the matter out of court, the fellow in the middle (Bruce Spencer) is a gangling geologist full of good intentions and "many silly questions." Modern civilization ("progressing toward nothingness") is variously compared to a runaway train, a supermarket built on holy terrain, a planet dangling from a noose. The mask of nobility worn by the aborigines is meanwhile allowed to crack briefly when one of the chiefs smiles and mouths the words to a waiter's song at a Greek restaurant. (A tribe's last survivor on the witness stand is utterly disconnected from the world, and then the alarm on his wristwatch goes off...) Like Ford's in Cheyenne Autumn, Herzog's eye gravitates away from the indigenous totem poles being celebrated to the eccentrics swarming in the sidelines: The wizened expert breathlessly describing the magnetic dimension of the titular insects, the octogenarian (Colleen Clifford) waiting beneath a parasol for her lost pooch, the beardo (Gary Williams) mumbling "My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky" before piloting a jumbo plane into the void. Peter Weir territory, "the shape of the universe and how it moves," little mysteries. The tornado whipping across the screen ends up in Gummo. With Norman Kaye, Ralph Cotterill, Nick Lathouris, and Basil Clarke.
--- Fernando F. Croce |