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.

Voyage en Deuce

 

Director Michel Deville

VOYAGE EN DOUCE         A-                                                                                            France  (98 mi)  1980  d: Michel Deville

What women talk about when men aren’t around.                                                                        —film tagline

Michel Deville found great critical and box-office success in France, perhaps achieving his greatest success with LA LECTRICE (THE READER) in 1988, but was relatively unknown abroad, never to achieve the international notoriety of New Wave contemporaries like Godard or Truffaut.  While made in 1980, this film is reminiscent of the playful spirit of the 60’s, which was a decade obsessed with frequent flashbacks, an aesthetic that felt so liberating at the time, like an ode to freedom, including the dizzying flashback sequences in Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Wojciech Has’ THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965), Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968), or Robert Enrico’s ZITA (1968), and curious narrative experimentation in the early 70’s from Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) (1974), which this film emulates, where music seems to open an imaginary portal into the world of erotic daydreams through an elegant use of Beethoven Bagatelles (Beethoven: 6 Bagatelles, Op. 126 - 4. Presto - YouTube 4:18) played by Katia Labèque that provide a seductive, A Midsummer Night’s Dream spirit of reverie.  The lightness of touch is compelling, essentially the story of two women, friends since childhood, who relate to each other with such a tender affection, exquisitely expressed by the performances of Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin, with Sanda so riveting in Bresson’s Une Femme Douce (1969) and also Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970) and 1900 NOVACENTO (1976), while Chaplin, the daughter of Charlie Chaplin who is best known for her ditzy, off-kilter performances of unstable characters, worked with Robert Altman in Nashville (1975) and A Wedding (1978), as well as Alan Rudolph in WELCOME TO L.A. (1976).  Hélène (Sanda) and Lucie (Chaplin) are both married, Hélène with two young children and Lucie childless, but like so many of us, their lives fall short of their youthful expectations.  Deville shows a distinctive interest in developing the female characters by exploring personality traits, as the blond Hélène is bolder, more outwardly aggressive yet culturally refined and sophisticated, a writer of children’s books, showing endless signs of being curiously inquisitive, while the brunette Lucie is fragile, emotionally torn, more easily hurt and brought to tears, something of a drama queen and prone to exaggerate, pampered and groomed by Hélène, with both exuding a charm filled with alluring feminine mysteries, as Deville displays a unique ability to direct women onscreen.  While this film is directed by a man, it’s a sensuous exploration of female desires and recollections, mostly seen through the eyes of Hélène, whose sexual fantasies are sensuously visualized on the screen, told in a very literary style, notable for its episodic flashback structure, derived from 15 different anecdotes by 15 different French writers of both sexes.  There is no limit to the reach of fantasy, especially in contrast to the banality of our lives, yet this film allows a deeply repressed sensuality and sensitivity to resurface, showing none of the surreal sexual perversity of Buñuel, as this is more tastefully refined, more character driven, where the luxurious beauty of the sunny French Provencal landscape is cleverly integrated into the dreaminess of the storyline. 

When Deville decided to become a film director, he asked Cahiers du Cinéma magazine editor Éric Rohmer, whose articles he appreciated, to cowrite his first film with him, but Rohmer was already working on The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion) (1959), so instead he decided to work hand-in-hand with editor Nina Companeez, who was particularly gifted in dialogue, and the two ended up collaborating on 12 films together.  He also discovered another major influence, costume designer, assistant, producer, and cowriter Rosalinde Damamme, who he ended up marrying, so there is a distinct woman’s touch in this film.  Opening with a sensuous concert performance of Brahms Lieder by British soprano Valerie Masterson, Christa Ludwig sings Brahms "Sapphische Ode" - YouTube (2:59), it opens yet quickly departs from the conventional male gaze, where a point-of-view shot of a man sitting in front row seats next to Hélène drifts to the singer’s cleavage, where it appears she’s singing just for him, with everyone else erased from the room, ending with a long shot of the concert hall where all have left except this privileged male viewer and the singer still onstage locked in his gaze.  This diversion from reality sets the tone, disconnected from the rest of the storyline, but it does exemplify how the mind wanders into its own realm, as if on its own, where the essence of this film blends eroticism into elaborately realized flashback sequences, with men primarily relegated to the background, becoming more of an attempt to explore the female psyche.  Afterwards Hélène discovers Lucie sitting outside her door, terribly distraught and in tears after an argument with her husband, convinced its time to leave him, though what she describes hardly seems like grounds to break up, instead she’s unhappy with the trajectory of her own life, and he’s easiest to blame.  Hélène listens intently, but has to laugh when she discovers much of what she hears is completely made up, thinking a road trip is the right medicine, that it will nourish and revitalize the soul, so the two women decide to take a road trip from Paris to southern Provencal in search of a summer house to rent. The brief glimpse we have of Hélène’s home life paints a portrait of domestic happiness, yet it also feels equally restricted by societal convention.  So their trip is defined by an exchange of fantasies and flirtations, both real and imagined, which are smart and engaging, though nothing is ever clarified or spelled out, with reveries and flashbacks replacing a conventional narrative, as both women attempt to fill an emotional void, tenderly narrated by each women, opening up a more adventurous and risky world that has been notably absent from their more cautious lives, where the journey is an opportunity to taste undiscovered freedom, filled with eye-opening, voyeuristic revelations that may haunt viewers for years to come.             

Once they hit the road, a passing train, like in an Antonioni movie, evokes a fleeting childhood memory that suddenly resurfaces with its intensity intact, with Marion Gautier (Hélène at fifteen years old) and Myriam Roulet (Lucie at fifteen years old), offering personalized insight that literally teases audiences with a provocative sexual subtext, recalling the innocence of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divu) (1970), though channeled through a modern sensibility when expressed as an adult.  The closeness of the women is never in dispute, displaying surprising tenderness and affection, with titillating signs of a lesbian romance that is only hinted at and never realized.  Sanda is exquisitely sensual in her aloof beauty, appearing soft and cool, while the nervously impatient Chaplin is allowed to expand her range, delivering one of her career best performances, as the women flirtatiously dance around each other throughout their escapades.  In one encounter, Hélène coaches an adolescent male waiter delivering room service, both lying in bed in their hotel room, on the proper technique to kiss a woman, instructing him to pay attention to the surrounding erogenous zones, inflaming her desire merely by insinuating what’s about to occur, which has the effect of stimulating his own desire, which they teasingly make fun of, taking advantage of his youthful inexperience, exiting in a flurry of embarrassed humiliation.  In another rather amusing yet inflinching moment, Hélène sits around a table of elderly grandmothers sipping tea and starts masturbating, which they don’t even notice.  This sense of manipulative provocation empowers both of them, taking delight in exploring the beauty of the French countryside as they visit several picturesque houses, with Hélène photographing Lucie in the idyllic surroundings, who gets in the mood by getting au natural before the camera, telling stories that are tinged with fantasy, allowing them to play out in the viewer’s imaginations through the eloquent narrations while also seeing a luminous visualization, with the Beethoven piano music beautifully providing the texture of these sensitive stories.  As they explore their friendship, which encapsulates their lives, the mood shifts on a dime as Lucie recalls a horrific rape, which is heard on audio only, playing out the excruciatingly ugly details, think Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (Irréversible) (2002), while Lucie and Helene are seen in a series of elegantly composed long shots walking slowly through the countryside in an idyllic setting of pastoral serenity.  The chilling effect of how this moment is realized is simply stunning, as it taps into a full range of raw emotions that defines just how well executed this small gem of a film really is, remaining imprinted into our imaginations, even after the passing of nearly half a century.  By the end of the film we return to the male gaze, and it feels so astonishingly different, with the women switching places, as the two personalities blend into one, having reconsidered and reevaluated their lives, with Lucie dutifully returning to her husband while Hélène sits on the landing outside her own door, having shed that former persona, now seeing herself in a new and completely different light.  Boldly adventurous, daring to go where few films are willing to go today, as the use of nudity is sparing, but effective, an unforgettable experience from such an impressionistic, female-forwarded film that resounds with such astute artistry.