The Goddess of 1967

 

Director Clara Law

actor Rikiya Kurokawa

actress Rose Byrne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE GODDESS OF 1967        A                                                                                                Australia  (118 mi)  2000  d: Clara Law

Did you see Melville’s LE SAMOURAI?  “The closest thing to a perfect movie I’ve ever seen.”   —John Woo, director

Neither silent or moving.                                                                                                        Neither perceivable nor imperceptible.                                                                                            Neither nothing or everything.                                                                                                         A state of mystery, paradox, ambiguity.                                                                                       That is what I tried to capture in this film.
—Clara Law, director

The American road movie may have first been introduced to film viewers in Westerns, with its vast roads and frontiers to be forged as white settlers crossed the country in search of a better life during the land grabs, where a bittersweet existential message may have surfaced as early as John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), where the road was filled with downtrodden and beaten-down Dust Bowl farmers during the Depression.  Several decades later, postwar prosperity viewed the open road as an escape from the conventionality of suffocating 1950’s conformity, with Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William S. Burroughs hitting the road in their own mythical journeys of self-discovery, where characters are often transformed by the experience and the people they meet.  In Australia, George Miller’s dystopian MAD MAX Trilogy (1979, 81, 85) was an action thriller exploring the vast Australian outback, where the road signifies menace, danger, and a fall from grace, while Wim Wenders’ futuristic Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt) (1991) that ends in the Australian outback is a sprawling, dreamlike epic, conceived and imagined as the greatest road movie ever made, over a decade in the making, filmed in 15 cities across four continents, yet money woes and its ambitious scope led to a disjointed, shortened release that confused critics and viewers alike.  While there have been a multitude of films depicting the horrific Australian colonial history towards Aboriginals, using the vast expanse of the land as a nearly unpassable cultural divide, including Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), Phillip Noyce’s RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (2002), Rolf de Heer’s THE TRACKER (2002), Ivan Sen’s BENEATH CLOUDS (2002), or Warwick Thornton’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #8 Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country (2017), there have also been multi-layered films like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) or Ray Lawrence’s LANTANA (2001) that remind us of the sinister nature of the Australian landscape, using the road to explore the mysteries of human nature, playing out like a detective story that viewers need to solve.  While there is a relative absence of Indigenous Australians in this film, Law tends to investigate what it means and how it feels to be human during times of transition, migration, isolation, and tragedy, where the remote landscape is accentuated with great detail, as if it were the surface of the moon, elevating it to a near mythical realm, with the director utilizing mosaic storytelling, going on an often-surreal, character-driven journey that is intercut with episodes from the past, probing moral ambiguities while pulling from different time periods.  Incorporating atmospheric music by Jen Anderson, she chooses to play a section from Verdi’s Requiem during one of the more gorgeous climactic moments, adding even more piercing drama to this moody spectacle, Christa Ludwig: Lacrymosa (Messa da Requiem) Giulini by ... YouTube (6:31).  Strangely, the movie was in many ways copied a few years later with Sue Brooks’ JAPANESE STORY (2003), starring Toni Collette, generating much greater box office success while also winning 8 out of the 10 nominated awards at the Australian AACTA Award ceremony in 2003.

A sense of menace also permeates the Australian outback in this contemporary road movie, most of which is shot in the Lightning Ridge area of New South Wales where many people work underground in the mines, told in a more richly layered cinematic language, revealing something very ancient and primeval, as it successfully blends film noir elements into contrasting periods of modernism and postmodernism.  The real surprise is the influence of Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), not only on the title, as Alain Delon, the cool, unsmiling hitman in the film, escapes authorities by driving around in a Citroën DS, known as the déesse, French for Goddess, which in an offbeat and wacky way also plays into the psychological mindset of the two lead protagonists.  Roland Barthes is quoted from his 1957 essay on The New Citroën, Roland Barthes' Mythologies, “It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky.”  The two main characters of the film are never named but are listed in the credits as BG and JM, which stand for Blind Girl and Japanese Man respectively.  In the wordless opening in an upscale Tokyo apartment, where every conceivable space is filled with snakes and reptiles, music is a key identifying factor, as young Japanese computer hacker and embezzler, JM (male Prada model Rikiya Kurokawa), displays his mad passions, taking an interest in buying a candy pink Goddess on the internet from a couple in Australia, but when he arrives with $35,000 in cash in a case at the front door, he discovers the owners have just blown themselves away in a murder suicide.  BG (Rose Byrne), a blind girl, freely shows them the bits of brains on the ceiling before letting him take her for a ride through the Australian outback.  For JM, his obsession with the Goddess is tied to the early French film, where it becomes clear that he sees parallels between himself and Delon, and therefore views the Goddess as his only means to successfully escape his crimes, with the road leading them into their respective pasts and futures.  For BG, her mother, and grandmother, the Goddess becomes the physical and metaphorical vessel in which three generations of abused women communicate their stories of suffering, combining a desolate land with a dark and haunting past, along with a shared desire by both of these strangers to transcend the past and find redemption.  Born in Macao and raised in Hong Kong, Clara Law comes from the Second Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers in the mid-1980’s that includes Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kwan, whose novel aesthetics and bold experimentation in cinematic language came to be defined as film artistry, breaking away from the more mainstream action-themed movies with a focus on martial arts and swordplay.  Law’s films are a poetry of displacement and transmigration, heavily influenced by Yasujirō Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, each with the capacity to touch one’s soul, reflecting an anxious period of transition from an independent Hong Kong back to the sovereignty of Mainland China in 1997.  In the early 90’s, Law moved to Australia along with her husband and longterm writing-producing collaborator Eddie L. C. Fong, making films that look at the pain and promise of the meeting of Asia and the West, which is an essential theme of this film, which turns into an abstract, completely original road movie through the Australian outback that also travels through the inner recesses of the blind girl’s memory and imagination, filled with murder, incest, and other horrors and pains, where despite a backstory provided for JM, she actually becomes the center of the story, The Goddess of 1967- feature film excerpt YouTube (2:12). 

Filled with ravishing, unforgettable imagery by Dion Beebe, who shot Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession (1995) and also worked with Jane Campion, Michael Mann, and Rob Marshall, reminiscent in some ways of Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinogenic MORVERN CALLAR (2002), this was shot on 35mm when that was still the norm, alternating different photographic styles depending on the era in which the scene is set.  This is easily one of the most hauntingly beautiful, yet strangest and most unclassifiable films you could ever see, where despite the largesse of the empty landscape continually filling the screen, immersed in a subjective artificial light, bursting with the brightness of the desert colors, much like Tracey Moffat’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), there is an accompanying inner journey through flashback sequences that keep going further back in time, The Goddess Of 1967. YouTube (42 seconds), providing the foundation and sustenance of BG’s existence.  While he’s a trustworthy character harboring only good intentions toward BG, her badass attitude completely shocks JM, who thinks he’s pretty badass himself, The Goddess of 1967 feature film excerpt YouTube (2:41).  At one point he is stupefied by her near cartographic memory of what road turns to take and when, which seems inconceivable, if not impossible for a blind person, perhaps a metaphoric projection by the director, but it’s an insistent reminder of just how unique she is, with Rose Byrne providing such a gorgeous performance, winner of the Best Actress Award at the Venice Festival.  The film is about contrasts, but also about deconstructing the significance of these contrasts, both suffering from a profound sense of loss, where the blend of their respective cultures and the unearthing of their personal stories comprises what storyline there is, but it’s told in such an oblique, abstract way, not easy to follow, yet dazzlingly inventive.  By offering a genuine rapprochement between two of the most contrasting characters, an Australian woman and a Japanese man, the film illustrates the potential for characters from different cultures and worlds to be able to develop beyond racial constructions and cultural differences.  Modernism is represented as the past, but also in connection to Australia, whereas Japan is represented as a postmodern Tokyo, which is visually represented several times in the film, in the beginning, middle (JM’s flashback to his past) and at the end.  Each of these, besides the middle flashback, represents Japan in a blurred, blue-wash filter, saturated in an experimental video look, where the images of Tokyo are intended to represent a surreal, hi-tech, futuristic, unfriendly, machine-driven otherworld.  JM is trying to escape not only his past and commitments, but also a general dissatisfaction with Japan, where so much value is placed on conformity.  When BG asks JM about Tokyo, he responds that it’s like living on Mars.  The best scene takes place when he plays the jukebox in an old bar and teaches her to dance, a wildly exuberant moment that still astonishes to this day, (HD) The Goddess of 1967 - Dance Scene (rus) / Богиня 1967 ... YouTube (3:42).  Winner of Best Director of the Chicago Film Festival in 2000, perhaps the only time the film has ever been shown locally, it feels like a cinematic, psychological subconscious exploration, admittedly convoluted, growing increasingly complex, accentuating color, texture, and composition, where a stunning tonal atmosphere takes precedence over any narrative coherence, featuring unexpected twists, a gripping emotionality, and an imaginatively distorted natural decor of the Australian outback, providing the film’s penetrating power to the inner world of these characters, two damaged souls, both driven to become reacquainted with the worlds from which they come.    

Note                                                                                                                                               As mentioned by JM in the film, President Charles de Gaulle survived an assassination attempt at Le Petit-Clamart near Paris on August 22, 1962, planned by Algerian War veteran Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry.  The plan was to ambush the motorcade with machine guns, disable the vehicles, and then close in for the kill.  De Gaulle praised the unusual abilities of his unarmored Citroën DS with saving his life – the car, riddled with bullets and with two tires punctured, was still able to escape at full speed.  Afterward, De Gaulle vowed never to ride in any other make of car.

Vacant Possession

Writer/director Margot Nash

Actress Pamela Rabe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VACANT POSSESSION             A                                                                                  Australia  (95 mi)  1995  d:  Margot Nash

Some dreams you remember as if they were real.  Others are like fragments that float away, never to be held.  This dream returned to me, again and again.  I knew it was about home because it started here on a boat, heading for Botany Bay, birthplace of a nation, my birthplace, my home.               —Tessa (Pamela Rabe), opening voiceover narration

Initially seen at the Chicago Film Festival in 1995, where it left a strong impression, something of a revelation at the time, yet it was never released in the United States either onscreen or in a DVD format, so inquiries were made into the availability, only in Australia, apparently, but the film is currently undergoing an HD restoration with an expected DVD release in the summer.  Made by a female Australian director who is white, told from a white perspective, yet she incorporates indigenous characters and themes into the film that remind us of their racist history, as whites just took from aboriginals what they felt belonged to them, including their land, inventing laws to support their own actions, as aboriginals were denied land rights until the landmark Mabo decision of 1992, Mabo decision | National Museum of Australia, just a few years before the making of the film.  Prior to that, aboriginals were viewed as less than human, “part of the flora and fauna,” not even granted citizenship until the 1967 “citizenship” referendum, and were never included in the nation’s census count (It's 50 years since Indigenous Australians first 'counted'. Why ...).  The irony, of course, is that aboriginals had access to the entire island prior to the arrival of whites, who basically colonized and occupied their land with the arrival of Captain Cook in Botany Bay in 1770, becoming the birthplace of white Australia.  Made before Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) or Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), but sometime after Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) or Tracey Moffat’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990), when very little was known in America about the Stolen Generations or Australia’s dispossession of the country’s indigenous population, where the white community in general remains ignorant of aboriginal culture and the British declaration of terra nullius, vacant land without ownership, claiming the entire continent as property of the British Crown.  A prominent theme in the film is the concept of home, viewed quite differently by whites and the indigenous, who take a more historical view, as it was the land of their ancestors since the beginning.  Set on the Kurnell Peninsula on the eastern shores of Botany Bay, an historical place where British explorer Captain Cook first came ashore, not far from what is now the airport, and beyond that the skyline of Sydney lies off in the distance.  This land that was once filled with fish and endless mangrove trees is now polluted by rows of toxic oil refineries and commercial shipping traffic, an Edenesque picture of Paradise Lost.  One of the few films to integrate memory as trauma, a prodigal daughter Tessa (the remarkable Pamela Rabe) returns home after the death of her mother, never accepted after she became pregnant by an aboriginal boyfriend as a teenager, with a particularly punishing white father Frank (John Stanton) who basically kicked her out and disowned her, exiled in some foreign land ever since.  With her past still an open wound, she attempts to come to terms with an uncertain future by revisiting her dilapidated family home, uninhabited, still haunted by painful memories, seen through extensive flashbacks, leading to a day of reckoning that leads to a healing or reconciliation, where exploring the past attempts to address the aboriginal legacy in Australian history, becoming a metaphor for the entire nation. 

According to the writer/director Margot Nash:

The great white Australian dream is to own a house but for Aboriginal people the dream is to regain ownership of the sacred land. When Captain Cook took possession of Australia in 1788 in the name of the British Crown, the land was deemed ‘Terra Nullius’ ie vacant, uninhabited. This principal (sic) was not overturned legally until the historic Mabo decision of 1992.

Vacant Possession is a film about an empty house, an inheritance inhabited by dreams and memories.

Growing up in Australia I never saw much less met Aboriginal people until I was an adult. The history books didn’t tell the stories of dispossession and destruction of the land, the stories of injustice and racism. While Aboriginal people live with the devastating consequences of colonisation many of them pity white people because we have no ‘place,’ no dreaming. We don’t know where we belong.

I wanted to explore notions of house, home, land, place, family and belonging from a white point of view. I wanted to explore the image of the house as a psychological space that could be possessed and I wanted to tell a story of a dysfunctional white family ripped to shreds by alcohol and the effects of war.

The opening premise of Vacant Possession is the death of the mother. After years of estrangement Tessa returns home when her mother dies leaving her and her sister the family home. A house haunted by emotional memories. I started writing about the mother/daughter relationship, about grief and estrangement and the past. I saw it as a metaphor for the breakdown of relationship to land, country and place. I wanted to engage with contemporary issues such as environmental destruction and family breakdown. I ended up making a film that was also about the father/daughter relationship, about repressed male grief and the complexities of reconciliation in the present.

This film is a first feature following a series of low-budget documentaries, a bold attempt by a white director to contribute to an ongoing dialogue with indigenous Australians, creating a memory play, an impressionistic mosaic blending together the present with the past, continually drifting between dream and reality, often in the same shot, like Greek director Angelopoulos, with Tessa moving from room to room, haunted by the ghosts of the past, where an extensive use of flashbacks explores different aspects of her past.   Returning after many years, she is flooded by memories, which are very fragmented and abstract, yet poetically beautiful, shot by Dion Beebe, who has worked with Clara Law and Jane Campion.  Trying to set her life in order, she reconstructs bits and pieces of the past as they intrude into the present, using dream fragments, memories, and voiceover thoughts to express her changing perspective, becoming a morality tale told with a modernist sensibility, with Tessa exhibiting very liberated views for her time, still feeling very contemporary.  In this film the white characters are trapped, or exiled, from their own family dysfunction, while the Koori aboriginal families that live nearby exude a more natural freedom that is rare in Australian cinema.  Tessa freely intermixes with them, befriending a bright young aboriginal girl named Millie (Olivia Patten), who becomes, in effect, the child she never had, sharing stories and personal experiences together, becoming the one character in the film she can trust.  Her innocence is in stark contrast to the more overcontrolling will of Tessa’s older sister Kate (Linden Wilkinson), who already has designs on taking her full share from selling the house, claiming their mother left it to her, which is a major jolt to Tessa, who claims her mother always meant for them both to share the home.  But she has been gone for a long time, surviving as a professional gambler, never really establishing roots anywhere.  Recalling the incident that drove her away, Tessa is loath to see her father again, never the same since the war, dealing with recurring flashback episodes, reliving the war in his own kitchen with paranoid delusions, a rifle constantly at his side, having his own traumatizing issues to deal with.  His racist animus directed towards her teenage aboriginal boyfriend leads to a drunken shooting spree, driving her away and never looking back.  Early on we see Kate shares her father’s sentiments towards black-skinned neighbors, appalled they would come in and out of the yard, as Millie does frequently looking for her missing cat.  As Tessa goes through her mother’s things, she discovers an old faded newspaper clipping with the headline “Health Fears Over Botany Bay Mercury Find,” revealing how the waters have been poisoned by the discovery of toxic metals in the bay, which may account for her mother’s ill health, and might also explain Tessa’s throwing up on a neighbor’s lawn, which doesn’t at all surprise Auntie Beryl (Rita Bruce), Millie’s grandmother, who’s seen it all and knows all about the polluted waters.  It was Auntie Beryl’s son Mitch (Graham Moore) who impregnated Tessa and was the object of Frank’s ire, filing trespass charges against him that sent him to jail for years, dying from a heart attack not long after his release.  In a spirit of good faith, Tessa considers offering the home to Auntie Beryl in compensation for losing her son.  It’s Millie, however, who chastises her, “We don’t want your house.  Why do you white people always think you know what we want?”

According to Australian film critic Adrian Martin, Vacant Possession - Film Critic: Adrian Martin, “It’s unquestionably one of the best and most impressive Australian films of the 1990s.”  Among the first to view an early draft of the film was an aboriginal audience from La Perouse, the original setting of the film, the only Sydney suburb where aboriginal people have kept their territory from Cook’s settlement until today, where the director heard harsh criticism about how racist it was, with a large plurality sharing that same sentiment, so she brought in an official aboriginal advisor, Kathy Kum-Sing, who helped her reset the story to the other side of Botany Bay, as despite being a fictional story the aboriginal community assumed it was about them and felt culturally undervalued and not listened to.  This harsh rebuke taught the director an essential lesson, “I came to understand that as a white person I couldn’t tell aboriginal stories.  That’s for aboriginal people to do.” So she changed the focus to become a broader “mythical story” of self-discovery, a very personal story revealing deep psychological issues to resolve, with a shared history of relationships with aboriginal neighbors, which helped her tell the story she wanted to tell without patronizing issues of cultural bias or blindness.  The question becomes one of how to reconstruct a shared future, how to mend the psychological rifts and allow some degree of healing to begin.  The film eschews sentimentality and empty platitudes, often defying explanation, using surreal dreamlike imagery where snakes become a recurring presence, viewed completely differently by whites and aboriginals, one living in fear and the other in harmony with nature.  There’s some cool original jazz music written by Alistair Jones, kind of an improvised cello, piano and trumpet riff that feels particularly inspired, adding emotional heft to the scenes, spending plenty of time in the old home where Tessa grew up which becomes a major character in the film, as if it’s haunted, filled with weird sounds and ghostly skeletons to explore, using powerful imagery to depict important themes, like dispossession, which is at the root of the family and the nation’s instability.  Because so much takes place at a single location, it has the depths of a stage play, though much of it feels wordless, with flashback memories recurring with regularity.  Developing a relationship with the land, even when ownership is uncertain, is of primary importance, as we learn Tessa’s father built their home himself, with designs to get it back, troubled that he won’t ever be whole without it.  We learn her mother received the land in a lottery, by a stroke of luck, with the courts awarding her the house in a divorce dispute afterwards, leaving her husband the odd man out, perpetuating his feelings of angst and alienation.  But Millie gets it right, acknowledging simply “A home is a place.  It’s where you belong.”  There are few other films that this resembles, perhaps reminiscent of the incomparable Jeanne Moreau in Wim Wenders’ sprawling 5-hour epic Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt) (1991), both feeling uniquely original, as if testing the waters, filled with vibrant characters that matter, never really knowing what to expect.  Highly ambitious while routinely taking risks, it won’t please everyone, as there are underlying subconscious layers of symbolism that not everyone may recognize, while others may feel they are heavy-handed, yet there’s something uniquely satisfying about this picture, an art film with aspirations to become culturally relevant by being blisteringly honest.