[3.0]
Although there is a plot here, this Peter Weir film is pretty abstract, filled with dreamy sequences set to a droning aborigine-inspired soundtrack. The film opens with a bizarre storm that descends on a small Australian town and soon moves to the big city where more strange events transpire. David is a lawyer assigned to help defend an aborigine man who is accused of killing another man, but David soon suspects that tribal magic may be the real culprit. There are long, dense scenes where nothing really happens, and Richard Chamberlain mainly plays David as a series of baffled glances, but there is an otherworldly feel to this film, despite its obvious shortcomings. Weir himself makes note that to view the aborigines with pity or as mystical ‘others’ is the privilege of the white middle class, but this is the story he has set for himself. These people have special rights all their own, and perhaps this dream magic is a part of that, but there are so many questions left unexplored, such as why exactly David is tied in to all of this mess. If it is true that he, as a white man, is one of the tribe’s ancestral gods, the socio-political aspect of the film gets a bit murky (it makes the aborigines yield to the white man once again, yet now out of their own desire and respect for his godself). I might just be jabbering nonsense, but a lot of this film also felt like nonsensical mumbo jumbo. I’m curious how much of it is based in actual tribal lore, and how much is pure fiction. It also didn’t help that this is a film more about ideas and feelings than characters and plot. I couldn’t care at all for either the aborigines (who always maintained stone-cold expressions and didn’t seem to have an interest in anything other than drinking and playing pool and dabbling in magic) or David and his boring white-bread family. Regardless, the filmmaking here is top-notch and it has the sort of tonal power as Weir’s earlier masterpiece PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
burning retina 