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.

A Patch of Blue

A PATCH OF BLUE             B             
USA  (105 mi)  1965  ‘Scope  d:  Guy Green

Selina:  “I know everything I need to know about you. I love you.  I know you’re good, and kind.  I know you’re colored and I…”

Gordon:  “What’s that?”

Selina:  “…And I think you’re beautiful!”

Gordon:  “Beautiful?  Most people would say the opposite.”

Selina:  “Well that’s because they don’t know you.”

A variation on the Cinderella fairy tale, told Hollywood style in a wrenching racial melodrama about an 18-year old blind girl, Elizabeth Hartman as Selina D’Arcy, who’s been kept out of school and forced to do menial chores at home all day doing the cooking and cleaning for her tyrannical mother, Rose-Ann (Shelley Winters), before meeting a stranger in Gordon Ralfe (Sidney Poitier), who happens to be black, though she doesn’t learn this until late into the picture.  Gordon befriends her and takes an interest in what’s happening in her life, which leads to a cataclysmic upheaval in her life once her mother finds out.  Literally locked inside her apartment with few opportunities to ever go outside, Selina leads a stifling existence, where her mother’s mental and physical abuse has no bounds, yet she won an Academy  Award for a playing a woman so monstrous that she belongs in the discussion for worst mothers ever depicted onscreen, (which may be reserved for Franziska Weisz in her vile portrayal in Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) in 2014), where her grotesque sadism and sheer lack of humanity overshadows any and all racist shortcomings.  As portrayed in Steve McQueen’s more recent 12 Years a Slave (2013) or Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), white slave owners are depicted as not just evil, but are exaggerated into such sadistic caricatures that it’s reminiscent of Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004).  While this is an extremely popular characterization in Hollywood movies, it’s highly questionable whether this over-exaggeration may do more harm than good, resorting to a sado-masochistic indulgence to such an extreme degree that ordinary racists are paragons of virtue by comparison, so it really misses the point.  Coming a year after the legislative passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it’s hard to believe someone who so completely embodies racial bigotry would win an Academy Award for her performance, even though this film lays it on a bit thick in drawing the moral lines between good and evil, where Rose-Ann literally has no redeeming qualities whatsoever as a human being.  Winters herself revealed in interviews afterwards that it was difficult being this abhorrent, “I’ve always found something to like in the characters I’ve played, but not this time.  I really hate this woman.”  Adapted from the 1961 novel Be Ready with Bells and Drums by Australian writer Elizabeth Kata, the film alters the tone of the novel where the young girl shares her mother’s prejudices, going into a state of shock once she learns the truth about her newly discovered friend, handing him over to a mob of racist vigilantes.  That doesn’t happen here where the subject of race is cleverly downplayed, where instead it’s a film about a sheltered and abused blind girl’s personal liberation and freedom, optimistically breaking the shackles of the past and walking into a new era. 

Just two years earlier Poitier became the first black actor to win an Academy Award for his performance in LILIES OF THE FIELD (1963), which is interesting considering one of the central scenes of the film is the spirited rendition of the gospel song “Amen” Lilies of the Field - Amen - YouTube (3:06), where the musical arrangement and Poitier’s voice were supplied by Jester Hairston, as Poitier was notoriously tone deaf.  Certainly one of the most exceptional performances of his career went unrecognized by the Academy in A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1961), featuring an all-star black cast, where his youthful anger couldn’t have more perfectly fit the raging sentiment of the times.  Poitier went on to play the parts of noble and dignified black men not only in this film, but also TO SIR WITH LOVE (1967), IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967), and FOR LOVE OF IVY (1968), where as much as any other celebrity, white America came of age in the 1960’s identifying with the decency of Poitier as a black man, making him a safe choice with movie audiences that embraced him, helping raise awareness for more equal treatment of all races.  While this is an extremely conventional film, what’s interesting is how it balances the ordinary moments of Selina and Gordon spending time together and then how traumatizing it feels with her own mother, who treats her with little more than outright contempt.  There’s an interesting use of flashback and dream sequences, which were much more commonly used internationally in the 60’s than they are today, allowing directors greater freedom in exploring the psychological state of mind of the characters, where in this film it also provides a window into Selina’s brutal past, where her childhood was anything but innocent.  Gordon immediately picks up on this, where this perfectly normal girl, except that she’s blind, has endured and somehow prevailed under the most tragic circumstances.  In many ways it resembles the fragility of The Glass Menagerie, where Selena has been kept inside a cloistered existence all her life, completely unaware of the world outside that represents her yearning for freedom.  We eventually learn what a house of horrors she did come from, as her blindness was actually caused by her mother (discovered in bed with another man) who in a state of rage threw a bottle of hydrogen peroxide at her father when she was only five, where he ducked out of the way but it landed on her face, causing burned scars around her eyes and immediate blindness.  The title of the film references one of her earliest memories, where all she remembers is seeing a patch of blue sky out the window. 

The other surprisingly good aspect of the film is the inventive musical score by Jerry Goldsmith, and while it overemphasizes moments of sentimentality with heartwarming string music, very much a period of its time, it also takes a novel approach for more ordinary moments, creating a slightly jazz-tinged scenario with an interesting use of percussion, where the off-kilter music actually helps the audience see the scene in a uniquely different way.  The weight of the world seems to rest on Selina’s shoulders, having to endure a daily barrage of insults from her mother, who picks on her constantly, literally blaming Selina for all the troubles in her life, particularly her impoverished economic status, suggesting her own life would be so much better without the added burden.  To complicate the woes, Rose-Ann’s drunken father lives there as well, known as Ole Pa (Wallace Ford), and while he’s kinder to Selina than her berating mother who actually slaps her around, he’s pretty much useless, as he never really interferes.  He is willing to drop her off in the park one day, much to Selina’s delight, as the idea of spending an entire day outdoors is like a dream to her, having no problem whatsoever with having to wait until early evening for him to pick her up on his way home after work.  While sitting under a giant tree, she happens to meet Gordon as he lives nearby, where they quickly become good friends.  Astounded that she’s never had any education, and has been deprived of all the things that make life interesting, he helps her manage her away across a busy street intersection and introduces her to the food from a nearby cafeteria, while also teaching her how to use a public telephone and rest room.  Anchored to the same spot all day, she’s not hard to find, where he has a hunch she might still be out there during a heavy downpour of rain, helping her to the nearest protective cover.  In their meetings, she expresses the awe of discovering new things, like pineapple juice or different flavors of ice cream, while also confessing some of the most disturbing incidents that have happened under her mother’s care, which in her eyes is an ordinary occurrence.  There is an unworldly moment that certainly takes us by surprise when Gordon sings to her (in French no less!!) the words to a French children’s song that plays on a music box, A Patch of Blue: "Il pleut, il pleut, bergère." (49 seconds), but other than that, there’s nothing particularly dramatic about their scenes together, which is the beauty of the film, although the interracial eight-second kiss between them was cut for Southern audiences.  Well-acted and always intriguing, even Gordon’s brother Mark, Ivan Dixon, so superlative in Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964) a year earlier, questions his budding friendship with a blind white girl, realizing it could potentially cause a scandal, which it does once Rose-Ann accidentally sees them together on the street, bringing the wrath of Hell down upon her, scolding her for associating with a “nigger.”  Untouched by the sordid reality surrounding her life, Selina is pure of heart, where the music box becomes her most prized possession, as it symbolizes her friendship and developing love for another human being, where it ends on an ambiguous note, as the doors to her future swing open, but the social services available for the blind, mentally ill or disabled in the mid 60’s were hardly a picnic, many discarded for simply being too much trouble for their families, as evidenced in the hackneyed recut version of an early John Cassavetes film A Child Is Waiting (1963), which actually takes place on the premises of a California State Hospital for the Handicapped.  Clearly, however, as evidenced by the idealism expressed in both films, the seeds are planted for a more humane society.  If the 60’s was anything, it was an era of optimism and hope for a better future, despite the lingering Vietnam War and existing racial and economic disparities.

Note

For her performance, Elizabeth Hartman, who was 22 years old at the time, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, but suffered from lifelong depression, which worsened following her divorce in 1984, giving up acting and instead moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she worked at a museum while receiving treatment at an outpatient clinic.  On June 10, 1987, at the age of 43, Hartman committed suicide by jumping from the window of her fifth floor apartment.