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Lester's Cuba is the antecedent, Spottiswoode's Under Fire follows suit. "Opposite intensities," a Peter Weir specialty for Jakarta during the Sukarno regime, "toy town and city of fear." The foreign correspondent from Sydney (Mel Gibson) has much to learn about local unrest, initial dispatches scarcely impress editors: "That wasn't news. That was travelogue." The Chinese-Australian cameraman (Linda Hunt) unlocks diplomatic doors with erudite empathy, mordant sagacity and a knack for spelling out themes in voiceover. The triangle's third side is the British embassy aide (Sigourney Weaver), who catches the journo's eye by deeming one of his pieces "melodramatic" before frolicking with him under torrential downpours. The nation crumbles as the romance blooms—which one should be the focus for the metaphysical Aussie working with Hollywood money? "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics," goes the ditty in a companion piece to The Last Wave, inscrutable natives and underwater reveries and all. Demonstrators in the street and prostitutes in the cemetery, vivid glimpses of squalor courtesy of Weir's fascination with mysterious terrain. The fascinating center is Hunt's diminutive middleman, a figure saved from becoming a magical dwarf by a raspy bitterness over national injustices and the way that his multifaceted passion must yield to the affair of white movie stars for whom a land in anguish is largely an exotic thrill. (His low-angled vantage ponders famished children scooping rice off the pavement, then cuts to a screenful of headless tuxedos with cocktails.) "Wherever human misery is at its worst, the press will be there in force." That the climax turns out to be the hero's race to the airport is all too characteristic of a vision of turbulent Indonesia most at ease from the point of a departing plane. "Don't take it personally. You're just a symbol of the West." Cinematography by Russell Boyd. With Bill Kerr, Michael Murphy, Noel Ferrier, Bembol Roco, Paul Sonkkila, and Kuh Ledesma.
--- Fernando F. Croce |