Cinema
In the dark
Peter Ackroyd
The Year of Living Dangerously ('PG', selected cinemas)
T t begins with the shadows of demons mov-
ing across a cloth; they turn out to be pup- pets — the first of a number of sudden tran- sitions in a film in which the characters beat blindly against a material reality which sud- denly dissolves, or discover to their cost that 'spiritual' or ethereal matters can exert a strong and recognisable hold over the world and the flesh.
Guy Hamilton is an Australian journalist who has been posted to Indonesia in the mid-Sixties, at a time when President Soekarno is 'the voice of the third world' despite the fact that his people exist in grotesque poverty and that the general air of the Indonesians seems to be one of unar- ticulated quietism. We are, I suppose, in territory which the director of this film, Peter Weir, has already rendered familiar: all these Asians baffle and annoy Guy Hamilton as he sets out after his big 'story', and Mr Weir is once again examining the Australian identity in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is. There is a mystical or at least quasi-spiritual tone here also: the shadows and the demons are simp- ly the beginning, and in the course of his brief and painful career in Indonesia Guy Hamilton confronts implicable and mysterious forces which send him running back home again. 'Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia,' his companion (a strange asexual dwarf) tells him; all around him are strange and powerful images of the maimed and the poor. You can feel the humidity entering his soul.
Mr Weir's preoccupations are very seduc- tive ones, teetering as they do in that sha- dow line between East and West which is also a shadow line within consciousness itself. The question which Westerners ask, when faced with social and economic dereliction, is the Tolstoyan 'What then must we do?' But there are no answers of- fered by the characters here — paradoxical' ly, the film derives its power precisely from the absence of such answers, from the vacancy into which Guy Hamilton and the others fall.
The Year of Living Dangerously is directed in an oblique and sometimes un- tidy way which looks at first like conven- tional 'realism' but which, it soon becomes clear, is the manifestation of a very stylish intelligence: the focus of action and atten- tion is always opening out from the characters to the landscape or cityscape beyond, conversations are sometimes dif- ficult to hear as the low, seething sound of external life intrudes. This creates a most ! peculiar tone: 'the unseen is all around us' is one phrase used in the film, and indeed under Peter Weir's direction this is a land full of spirits. But this is not to suggest that the film gets lost in a fog of inanition or plaintive sYni," bolism: Mr Weir knows that his first — Our most difficult — task is to construct a P1°` and to tell it convincingly; the story of GLI,Y., Hamilton's slow awareness of what exact', it is he has got himself into, and his desperate attempt to get himself out again as quickly as possible, is, as critics say, grip' ping. This owes a great deal to the acting °I Mel Gibson, who plays the role. He is stIP.F posed to be a 'discovery', the new `star' the Eighties: certainly he has a hardness ol outline which is very effective on the large . screen. He consistently underplays, but off is aware all the time of the severity of COjr centration which he brings to the Party Sigourney Weaver, who plays an official ° the English Embassy with whom he has 0' affair (significantly the weakest part of the story), is also very effective: she is an e4; traordinarily intelligent actress, who in role manages to suggest frailty while giving all the appearance of strength. Between them, they give the picture solid ballast. The script, too, is less woebegone than most: 'The great advantage of being dwarf', Hamilton's diminutive companion says, 'is that you can be wiser than other people and no one envies you.' This is most remarkable performance from the atti tress who plays the male dwarf — °rid touching and sinister, with the gravity ,a„s also malice of the child, aware of emotio; which he cannot himself satisfy or cotivt
cingly express. film
The Year of Living Dangerously is a in about people who are not quite at home the world, in which their own loss of direc, 4 tion and loss of faith are linked to the ni'av brutal dispossession of the Asian poor --red of them part, however, of the sac,. of shadow play' which provides the mot,l'ale the film: 'the shadows are souls an Weir screen is heaven'. And so Peter w
attempts to link both public and private events, while at the same time suggesting a larger perspective in which they can all be seen. It is a difficult theme and, if he is not altogether successful in completing it, that is because no one could be.
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