PAUL STENHOUSE AUSTRALIA




THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Australia, 1982.
Mel Gibson, Linda Hunt, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Kerr, Noel Ferrier, Michael Murphy.
Directed by Peter Weir

SHORT REVIEW

The star of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, filmed in the Philippines and Australia, is Linda Hunt, a stage actress who plays Billy Kwan, an Australian- Chinese photographer who befriends Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) a naïve Australian reporter in his first overseas posting. Billy is the common thread of humanity running through a beautifully told but menacing tale of poverty, political power-play and opportunism set in Sukarno’s Indonesia in 1965. He is the link between the main players. His fate symbolises that of Sukarno and the Communists (PKI). Weir’s direction is masterly. Signourney Weaver co-stars, as does Noel Ferrier.


LONG REVIEW

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) is a very Australian film. The novel on which it is based was written by Christopher Koch, and the screen-play was jointly the work of Koch, Peter Weir, and David Williamson. It was filmed in Australia and in the Philippines, and it featured well-known Australian actors. The action all takes place in Indonesia, Australia’s closest neighbour, with whose independence Australia was much involved after World War II, and with whose people Australia has always felt close.

Indonesia’s human misery and natural beauty, as well as its complex and cosmopolitan political scene centred on the Sukarno regime in 1965, are the backdrop against which Weir’s intriguing version of Indonesian political shadow puppetry is played.

It is usually described as a romantic thriller because young Australian correspondent Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) on his first posting overseas becomes infatuated with Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) who works in the British Embassy in Jakarta. It is that, and much more.

The sense of brooding menace that Weir visually creates – many scenes are shot in near darkness – is reflected in the obstacles one still encounters in attempting to discover what really happened in Indonesia in October 1965. One wishes that for all his infuriating ambiguity of character Guy Hamilton was still around, prone to risk-taking as ever, and not willing to let a good story go untold.

When Guy arrives he is befriended by Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance), a part-Chinese photographer who is a dwarf, playing Everyman in this Mystery Play about the Good, the Confused, and the Evil. Billy seems to hold most of the cards – knowing (and having a file on) most of the major players in the cast, including the head of the Communist Party (PKI), highly placed Army officers, and members of the Foreign Correspondents Club as well as the Diplomatic Corps.

Of all the ‘expats’ it is Billy who gives the lie to the comment made to Hamilton by his assistant Kumar (Bembol Rocco) who was PKI: ‘Westerners don’t have answers anymore’. Because of Billy, Guy may have learnt something not many of his fellow foreign-correspondents seemed to understand: ‘they are also responsible who are indifferent as people die, and carefully take photographs or file reports’. Scenes of executions as Guy was heading for the airport and safety were a sombre reminder of the untold thousands who were massacred at the end of The Year of Living Dangerously.


CRITERIA FOR FILM REVIEWING
 
It is refreshing to be asked for ‘the criteria you use’ in judging a movie. No one doubts that protocols, principles, criteria and laws must be followed in maths and science, but these days one is more likely to hear something like, ‘Hey, man! What have rules and criteria got to do with the “Arts”?’

Criteria are standards, rules, principles, laws of a kind and protocols according to which we measure or evaluate whatever it is we are judging. So our indignant 21st century protester is not wrong in thinking that appealing to them poses some threat to random, whim-filled, ‘value-free’ artistic expression. Whether or not critics or those in the industry, are comfortable with this, critics are evaluators, weighers, measurers. And usually, to be fair to the reader who – if wise – is going to have to evaluate the evaluation, critics should give some indication of the measure they are using. And why.

It is stating the obvious to say that criticism – whether of film, art, music or literature – in our relativistic society, is a hazardous occupation. Critics themselves come in for a lot of criticism. Much of it personal and rarely objective.

Critics can flounder about in a relativistic world of art and culture, where we are conscious of almost drowning along with our – often subjective – standards in the political correctness of mercurial artistic ‘values’. We find ourselves bedazzled by the multiplicity of angles from which we can judge a work.

Before coming to criteria, at least three areas principally interest this critic:
1. Technique: Whatever else one may say, the majority of main-stream films these days is competently made. High quality professional movie-making techniques, with all their technical subtleties and infinitesimal variations, are a ‘given’. It is usually a question of a Director’s doing ‘better,’ of pushing expertise beyond limits, than of doing merely ‘well’. Most directors have no excuse for poor lighting, camera-work, sets or special effects – because skilled technicians who can supply these are readily available: provided you have the money.

2. The viewer has a right to know what the Director intends the film to be and say. A youngish female TV producer was being interviewed on radio not long ago and the interviewer commented that the programmes she produced bore out the adage that ‘art reflects life’. ‘Not at all,’ she retorted, ‘I make them because I want life to reflect my art’.

What the movie appears to be saying about politics, religion, individuals, values, morality, is probably what it is saying; and what the Director wants the viewer to believe and take away from the screening. Films are seldom just entertainment. They can be propaganda tools, social engineering devices and marketing exercises. International and domestic political and economic power brokers and lobby groups all take a keen interest in the medium. Not all religious or social groups that employ film as a promotional vehicle, are benign.

3. The effect on the viewer. This follows from 2. Not all viewers are mature. Not all are well-educated, with well-honed critical faculties that will protect them from assaults on their minds and beliefs. If movies had no effect on viewers, they would not be made, though the contrary is still asserted by some child-psychologists. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, commenting on lending libraries, begs to differ. His words apply also and especially to modern cinema and the internet:

‘Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge: it blossoms throughout the year, and depend upon it … they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last.’1

There are pharmaceutical standards, and standards for storing and preparing food. Testing how healthy or toxic the cinema ‘fruit’ is can be an onerous task.

As the writer is a Catholic priest, he cheerfully declares this up front. St Augustine tells us that ‘faith has eyes’2; and St Paul tells us that ‘reason’ too ‘has eyes’3. Bearing that in mind, when I see a film, whether for review, or simply for enlightenment or entertainment, I take my three sets of eyes along to the screening, and compare their findings.

Each of these separate ‘senses’ has criteria special to itself which enable an overall evaluation to be made that should be fair, reasonable, and above all open and honest about the work that is being evaluated. Faith measures the movie against criteria described in detail by St Paul in Galatians 5,22. Reason seeks truth, intelligibility and logic in the movie, especially in what it claims to be and do, and what it actually is and does. The human eye looks for the aesthetically satisfying, and judges the skill and cunning with which the movie achieves its aim. The evaluations of all three ‘eyes’ are harmonised so that a balanced critique can be given. No one expects a non-believing or irreligious Director to satisfy the demands of faith, though if these are not met, the reader has a right to know. Reason, however, can make legitimate demands upon the Director; as can aesthetics.

Movie-making technology is progressing so fast that film is relying less on skilled actors to get across its message. Digitalised, computer-generated characters and special effects, abound. We are witnessing the merging and mutation of visual media: film, internet and computer. Electronic games, and hand-held computers with access to the internet have invaded homes and class-rooms. The demise of movie studios is not inconceivable – with the consequent spectre of low-budget and potentially poor quality ‘films’ distributed over the internet with almost limitless access to world markets. In this situation humanity will have even greater need of informed and courageous critics of the visual media who will put their skills at the disposal of the community, and point the way forward for an artistic medium whose potential for good remains largely untapped.

1 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals 1775.
2 Epistola cxx Migne PL vol.xxxiii col.456, 8: ‘Habet namque fides oculos suos’.
3 Ephesians 1,18: ‘the eyes of your understanding’.



BIOGRAPHY

Paul Stenhouse is a Catholic priest-journalist, belonging to the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Issoudun, France. His doctoral thesis presented to Sydney University was a critical edition of the Kitab al-Tarikh by the 14th century Samaritan priest Abu ‘l-Fath. A foundation member, and a member of the Council of the Société d’Études Samaritaines within the College de France, and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, he has delivered papers at Colloquia organised by the Société in Paris, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Oxford, Venice, Helsinki and Budapest. He is the author of numerous monographs on Middle Arabic Grammar, and various aspects of Samaritan and Falasha history, chronology and religion. He is editor of Annals Australasia, and a Fellow of St John’s College, Sydney University.