donn (05/07/83)
Reference: sri-arpa.1197 (Yes, I know the sender of the original message won't see this... but I thought other people might be interested anyway.) A couple of small errors in the earlier article. The movie takes place not in the early Sukarno years in Indonesia, but the late. A number of viewers may have missed the point that the coup attempt by the PKI that was murkily presented at the end of the movie led to the end of Sukarno's "presidency". In the horrible weeks and months following the coup attempt Sukarno was forced from power and replaced by General Suharto; Sukarno died within a year of natural causes. (I've actually visited Sukarno's grave -- it has a trivial marker in a cemetery just outside the town of Blitar in East Java. Nothing to indicate that it is at all special, except for the flowers. Suharto's tomb, on the other hand, has already been built and cost millions of dollars; it is based on the rather ostentatious models of the ancient kings of Java...) The other goof is that the movie was actually shot in the Philippines, not Indonesia (this may have been pointed out before). While lacking veracity, this setting has verisimilitude (did I really write that?). Manila has slums that are possibly even worse than those in Jakarta. The pretty mountain scenes were probably shot in Baguio, a resort town in the mountains north of Manila in Luzon; there are a number of equivalently beautiful places in West Java (Cibodas, say, or Lembang). I did miss not being able to laugh again at the grotesque statuary that decorates most of the main intersections in Jakarta. (Expatriate favorites are "The Pizza Man", a gigantic bronze statue of a skinny man in apparent agony holding a bronze platter over his head that has bronze flames which light up at night, and "Sukarno's Erection", a tawnier version of the Washington monument with a gold-plated "flame" mounted at the very top...) As for my own feelings about "Year of Living Dangerously"... There were some things I liked about the movie, but by and large I have to say that I was disappointed. I thought that its worst fault was that it was shallow. It had some important messages to express about human relationships and failed to make a real case for any of them. I enjoy Peter Weir's cinematic style, and this movie has plenty of splendid images, but the strange angles and quick cuts serve only to distract here. In order to make the sort of moral statement that Weir appears to want to make, one cannot afford to be superficial or confusing. The satire on expatriate manners and habits was amusing and even accurate to a degree. There really are people for whom a photograph of a situation substitutes for understanding it, or whose idea of a human relationship with the native people is dancing with a prostitute. The contrast of health, wealth and happiness among the European and American expatriates with the poverty, sickness and death of the natives was reasonably well drawn and perhaps could have been taken further. But unfortunately none of this led me to believe in Billy Kwan. Linda Hunt gives an amazing performance as Billy, but for me the character of Billy is simply impossible; I can't rationalize Billy's behavior. The problem is that Billy's life is organized around symbols; every task he undertakes is quixotically directed at carrying each symbolism to its perfection. Real people are more than just symbols, in my experience. Billy's involvement with that pitiful woman living in a hovel by the canal was just as superficial as the American's infatuation with prostitutes; I wanted to throw up every time I saw the poor thing. The only Indonesian which we even marginally get to see as a human being is the gofer in the newspaper office who turns out to work for the PKI. (This fellow was actually played by an Indonesian, I believe.) The film doesn't involve us enough in Indonesian life, it doesn't make us believe enough in Indonesians as real people, to make the moral point that it does. Despite the fact that Billy Kwan is an intriguing character, he really is out of place in the plot of the film. The film might have been saved for me if Weir had left out all the silly foreign reporters and had let Billy go through Mel Gibson's ordeal, but nobody would have watched it in this country because it wouldn't have been about Americans, or even British and Australians. Sigh. Donn Seeley UCSD Chemistry Dept. RRCF ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn