Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week
Film release patterns are very strange. One week there’s a host of movies and film festivals opening, and the next there’s virtually zip to write about. This week sees only four new movies being released, in comparison to last week’s seven along with the feast of films featured in the Spanish/Latin American festival. But two of the movies opening this week are among the finest you’re likely to see this year.
Australian-born director Peter Weir’s films are usually about outsiders or minority groups. There was the Amish thriller, Witness; two soldiers caught up in a callous military structure in Gallipoli; and the perfect balance of comedy and horror in his debut masterpiece, The Cars that Ate Paris.
In The Cars that Ate Paris, Weir took his cue from JG Ballard’s Crash. The story revolves around a small Australian town that survives by creating vehicle collisions. The town’s economy relies on the sale of car parts recovered from the crashes, and the town doctor performs questionable medical experiments on the hapless highway victims.
Weir’s talent at blending cynicism, humour and paranoia is again borne out in his latest film, The Truman Show.
Arguably Weir’s finest work yet, The Truman Show is a wicked blend of satire and paranoid thriller turned into comedy. And next to The Cable Guy, this is Jim Carrey’s most intelligent and subversive film yet.
However, unlike The Cable Guy, The Truman Show doesn’t hold its blackness on the surface. It is not a gloomy film and cinema- tographer Peter Biziou has filmed it in iridescent pastels and swathed the screen in light.
The brilliance of the movie, however, is its central conceit dreamed up by New Zealand scriptwriter Andrew Nicol.
Truman Burbank has been the main character of a television show since birth. When the movie begins we’re in the 10 909th episode of the soap opera which is broadcast world-wide 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
Over 5000 hidden cameras – placed behind the bathroom mirror, in his ring, in his wife’s necklace, in his basement and around the town – record Truman’s life.
The eerily sweet town of Seahaven is, in fact, a huge studio with a community of actors who all play a part in Truman’s life.
Seahaven is all white picket fences and happy couples – the references to Walt Disney or Frank Capra’s idyllic suburban paeans are obvious.
But what Weir manages to do so well is to bring in the mad element without going over the top. When Truman visits the local travel agent in his first urge to get out of the town, he is confronted with posters of aeroplanes struck by lightning and warnings of virulent foreign diseases.
As Truman’s suspicions develop, and so in turn does his wanderlust, he notices that the community is acting on cue.
The mastermind of the Truman television show is the villainous, all-powerful, yet very empathetic Christof (played by Ed Harris).
The Truman Show is devastatingly ironic and very funny. Without sounding too indulgent, this is possibly the most intelligent satire of American values since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.
Weir said in an interview that his parents never owned a television set when he was growing up, nor did he own one when he first got married. It was only with the rise of video that he eventually bought one.
However, he says: “My attitude to television, personally, is too much of it is a bad thing. There’s no question about it to me. And it’s terrifying that it’s a big child-minder – as we know, working parents stick their children in front of the TV set and they’ll shut up. But what are they watching?”
Weir believes the film’s analysis of a huge corporate television station orchestrating and conditioning someone’s life could become a reality. He came to this realisation during post-production when he, along with millions of others around the world, watched the Princess Diana tragedy unfold on television.
“The heart of the film,” he says, “is this disturbance to our perception of reality, as a result of the immense entertainment and actuality coming at us, to the point where you can’t differentiate anymore …
“I thought: `If Princess Diana had had cameras inside the Mercedes and on the motorbikes following her, and the audience could have seen what happened – and she had survived – wouldn’t that have been wonderful.'”
Local and overseas critics have heaped praise on The Truman Show – for once I urge you to believe the hype.
It’s great to see a mainstream (note American) movie with guts and intelligence. But maybe this is because it was written by a New Zealander and directed by an Australian.
More arty, but no less artful is Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson which also opens this week at selective art houses in Cape Town and Johannesburg, moving on to Durban and Pretoria later.
Potter, whose extravagantly beautiful Orlando made her the hit of the international art circuit in 1993, has toned down her ambitions and has produced a semi-documentary – some might say narcissistic piece – in which she stars.
The story-line, which is negligible compared to the film’s visuals and sense of romantic import, has Potter struggling with a ridiculous film about serial killers (from which we see excerpts in garish colour while the rest of the picture is in luminous monochrome).
She begins to take tango lessons with Argentinean virtuoso Pablo Verone. Their strictly platonic, yet passionately Terpsichorean relationship, goes through all the throws of a conventional romance and by the end Potter decides to make the film we’ve just seen.
Some critics have accused The Tango Lesson of being vain, and Potter, almost reaching the age of 50, isn’t the most expressive or seductive female lead.
But her innate shyness and the glorious cinematography by veteran Robby Muller make the movie unmistakably sensual and touching.
It’s the images that move and not a contrived or melodramatic story-line. The Tango Lesson is perfectly cinematic.