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.

Benny's Video

BENNY’S VIDEO           C-            

Austria  Switzerland  (105 mi)  1992  d:  Michael Haneke

Obviously, in Benny’s Video and Funny Games I attempt to explore the phenomenon of television…I am most concerned with television as the key symbol primarily of the media representation of violence, and more generally of a greater crisis, which I see as our collective loss of reality and social disorientation.  Alienation is a very complex problem, but television is certainly implicated in it.  We don’t, of course, anymore perceive reality, but instead the representation of reality in television.  Our experiential horizon is very limited.  What we know of the world is little more than the mediated world, the image.  We have no reality, but a derivative of reality, which is extremely dangerous, most certainly from a political standpoint but in a larger sense to our ability to have a palpable sense of the truth of everyday experience.

—Michael Haneke, March 8, 2004 interview with Christopher Sharrett,  Kinoeye | Austrian film: Michael Haneke interviewed

One of the intriguing aspects about Michael Haneke is just how late he got into the game, as he was 46 years of age when he started work on his first feature film, having spent more than two decades writing plays and working in television, where surprisingly he was born before Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, or even Werner Herzog, all significant forces in the German New Wave of the 70’s, while Haneke was not at all a factor.  His surge of influence came later, perhaps described as post modernism, examining the human condition, including major themes like suicide or murder, but doing so in a way outside all established norms, directly confronting audiences, where he has a way of implicating them into his films, leaving questions unanswered by the end, forcing viewers to make their own moral choices about right and wrong.  He built a cinema of cruelty and discomfort, showing graphically disturbing adult content onscreen, which in itself is questionable, using exploitive imagery that crosses all boundaries of good taste, which disgusts some and creeps out others, but it serves to provoke audiences into extreme reactions.  In just his second film, the opening few minutes tells the story, as it amounts to a snuff film, with Benny, a young Arno Frisch, who we would see again in Funny Games (1997), arguably the most thoroughly despicable character in the annals of film history, does a dry run for that role here as a menacing 14-year old kid obsessed with videotaping everything, including the killing of a farmyard pig, with a captive bolt pistol to the head, which he then rewinds and watches again in slow motion and freeze frames, including the auditory wailing of the animal.  So yes, Haneke is the guy that made that film.  The audience is jolted into an awkwardly discomforting position in the opening few minutes of the film, already squirming in the hideous fascination with death.  While Fassbinder was driven to analyze the origins of the German Nazi in his massive TV mini-series BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980), using Franz Bieberkopf as his ordinary man who is capable of making that transition, now with this film Haneke has created his own making of a Nazi in contemporary German society.  In this case it’s not based on poverty and class oppression, or extreme deprivation, but comes from the rich and affluent class, as they’re the ones that never hold their kids responsible for anything, but allow them to literally get away with murder. 

While Haneke is a proponent that violent images on television or video games have an impact on society at large, contributing to a dehumanized effect, developing an appetite for greater and more destructive violent imagery, using Hollywood as the prime example, where after a while viewers grow numb to the impact, creating a fractured psychological fissure suggesting an absence of moral judgment, becoming more and more immune to behavioral consequences.  Films that were shocking in the 90’s are much more commonplace in today’s world, where there’s even terminology to describe it as torture porn, becoming a genre for cinema export. Because the world around us contains violent and disturbing war imagery that seems to play continuously on television news reports, including Bosnian atrocities shown here, Haneke suggests there is a direct correlation in the viewer’s ability to process this information, as some seem to feed off the violence, making them more prone to violent outbursts in their own behavior as well.  In America, for instance, how many school shootings have there been since Columbine?  Actually the number is 208, to be exact, as of February 2018, averaging one a week in the year 2015, (Parkland to Columbine School Shootings List | Westword, also School Shootings Since Columbine: By the Numbers - ABC News), where they have become so frequent that often they’re not even reported in the news anymore unless the casualty numbers are extreme, most with no prior criminal records, not even an arrest, where more than two-thirds of the offenders obtained their guns from a relative or from home.  In Benny’s case, he stole the bolt pistol from the farm, placing it in a drawer in his room for safekeeping.  What brief images we get of Bennie at school suggests he’s nonchalantly arrogant, viewing himself with a superiority complex, running a financially successful pyramid scheme, thinking he’s the smartest person in the room.  At home to wealthy parents, he’s the picture of polite obedience, sitting at the breakfast or dinner table, keeping his thoughts to himself, revealing little to nothing, retreating to the isolation of his room, which has been reconfigured to his liking, keeping the window curtains drawn, and a surveillance camera pointing down to the streets, with another live camera stream capturing any activity in his room, such as guests or visitors, with plenty of viewing screens for his pleasure.  When left alone, which is often, loud heavy metal music can be heard on full blast while he sits and does his homework.  Benny has an older sister Evi (Stephanie Brehme) who lives outside the home, but takes advantage of their parent’s absence with a huge party on the premises, having to answer for it afterwards with little to no consequences. 

Benny is a regular visitor at a local video store, where his taste for recklessly violent videos comes as no surprise, yet the film documents the banality of the ordinary routine, returning older videos, checking out new ones, each transaction written by hand on a company invoice, where we also see a brief exchange of money.   One day, when his parents are away for the weekend, he notices a girl (Ingrid Stassner) standing outside the video store at the window looking in, inviting her home, treating her to some reheated frozen pizza before showing her the pig video.  Not at all repulsed by it, so he pulls the bolt gun out of his drawer and teases her with it before shooting her offscreen, all captured by his live video screen.  Her cries and screams are heard constantly while he attempts to shut her up, yet reloads at the same time, shooting her again.  Her shrieks only increase in volume, which seems to set him into a panic, both drowning in hysteria before he silences her with a third shot, all happening just offscreen.  In the aftermath, he couldn’t be more casual, slipping into the kitchen for something to eat, wiping up blood on the floor, moving her into a closet where she is wrapped in plastic.  When he gets a call from a friend, they go out to watch a live band, spending the night at his friend’s place afterwards before returning back home.  Before he does, however, he gets a buzz cut, the preferred favorite of neo-Nazi’s, and the typical look behind being called skinheads.  After a brief lecture from his father about his hair, Benny shares the video with his parents, who are utterly shocked by what they see, but simply put him to bed without a word, before discussing the ramifications among themselves.  Georg, Ulrich Mühe, who returns as the beleaguered father in FUNNY GAMES and again as a sympathetic East German Stasi agent in THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), and Anna (Angela Winkler) attempt to rationally analyze their options, discussing the pros and cons with the same logic as if they were making a business decision, with Georg attempting to remain calm and unemotional, while Anna breaks into awkward smiles that suggest her own unease.  As he gets into meticulous detail about what they must do, it all sounds so scientific, without any thought whatsoever about the girl, or her family, or even their own son, for that matter.  As it is with most crimes, the cover-up is even more appalling, because those are supposedly the adults in the room.  With self-preservation taking center stage at the expense of all else, Georg sends Benny and Anna on a luxury trip to Egypt, supposedly for a family funeral, but it’s a ruse to give Dad a chance to dispose of the body and clean up afterwards, removing all evidence of a crime.  With Egypt being the cradle of European civilization, the irony is not lost on viewers, as the culture of human development has evolved into elaborate cover-ups for sophisticated crimes.  A glimpse of a reformed Benny near the end as a choir boy singing in church is perhaps too big a stretch, but the chilling finale is icy cold.  While overly grim and depressing, not really proving anything, the film reveals the raw amateurishness of an early career effort, where moral outrage feels more like a sermon, as Haneke literally rubs viewer’s noses with repeated images of the crime, watched afterwards by Benny again and again, literally rewinding the story and beginning again, a precursor of what’s to come in the more definitive Funny Games (1997), all implicating the viewer in the lapse of moral clarity.