FANTASIA OBSCURA: ‘Dreamtime’ and a Film From a Land Down Undah
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, we wake up to something we’d never expect in our lives…
The Last Wave (1977)
(Dist: World Northal, Dir: Peter Weir)
In the late 1970s, America discovered Australia.
More precisely, American film audiences discovered Australian cinema. The popularity of the “Australian New Wave” and its side iteration “Ozploitation” ultimately brings to American movie theaters, televisions and other media devices such talents as Hugh Jackman, Hugo Weaving, Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Barry Humphries, and Paul Hogan. Australia would give us such classics and touchstones as Moulin Rouge!, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Road Warrior (which inspired its highly respected reboot), Gallipoli, and Breaker Morant, and through these built a film making industry whose studios and production craft services helped bring about the Star Wars prequels and the Matrix trilogy.
All of which came about when American audiences went to see a small film about the Dreamtime, the displacement of original peoples by Europeans, and how little we understand about the bigger world around us…
The film opens with an Indigenous Australian doing rock paintings, before a rural Outback school gets hit with extreme rain and hail the size of cricket balls. Down south in Sydney, a freak rainstorm which the radio announcer notes is blamed on a sudden Antarctic cold front as is the storm we watched, is but a small inconvenience for David Burton (Richard Chamberlain), a lawyer with a practice in tax law with a comfortable life out in the suburbs with his wife Annie (Olivia Hamnet).
His life gets more complicated when he’s called in to provide assistance through his volunteer work with Australian Legal Aid; even though he’s not a criminal lawyer, his working with the native peoples on a land issue in the past makes him more qualified than anyone else to take the case of defending five men against a manslaughter charge.
Not feeling he has the trust of all the defendants, he concentrates on one of them, Chris Lee (David Gulpilil), to get to the truth of the case. To do that, he shares with Chris that he met him in a dream before seeing him in person, which Chris takes very naturally. Winning his trust, Chris is now willing to discuss matters of the case accompanied by Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula, a tribal magistrate and artist making his only appearance on screen for this film), who is revealed to be a shaman for the indigenous peoples on trial, a tribe that still occupies Sydney without notice from the Europeans that have taken their land from them. Through Charlie, David ultimately finds his purpose in this world and the special role he has to play, which is at odds with everything he grew up believing.
Despite his best efforts, things do not go well for David in court. He’s hampered by his client turning on him on the stand, which on top of the ignorance and fear of the indigenous peoples he faces from his colleagues and family, is an ignobility that brings him down. Which is nothing compared to the apocalyptic vision David has been having since the trial began…
Weir’s film has at its center elements of the fantastic and spiritual that we in modern society ignore at our peril, what native Australians refer to as the Dreamtime, the space where the physical and spiritual meet. It’s a central conceit to the film, as Weir explained in an interview from 1979, and its use in the movie gives it a sense of wondrous dread as David falls out of his comfortable existence for a destiny he struggles to reconcile. The fact that the fantastic elements are not directly menacing the characters with purpose as much as they are natural occurrences with no care of them, less an invading hoard than a grave natural disaster, gives them even more power in their portrayal than one would expect from such forces on film. (If anything, radical changes in the weather carries more of an impact with modern audiences than with those from the time, as we now live in a world dealing with climate disruption.)
To bring this about, Weir crafts an atmosphere out of tools most film makers would not consider, either because they have too limited a vision or too big of a budget. Shooting much of the fantastic set pieces in the dark enhances the menace suggested in the film in the failure of what we hold as “normal,” and the use of a didgeridoo by Charles Wain on the soundtrack give the audience the full sense of the interaction that makes up the Dreamtime. The use of water by Weir as symbol throughout the film gives it a unifying visual theme, a theme of flow, of change, and ultimately of transformation, whether we were ready for it or not.
In terms of greater transformation, the movie did just that for American cinema by opening the door for Australian projects. Weir’s prior production, Picnic at Hanging Rock, had problems getting distributed in the US before The Last Wave suddenly made it a hotter property. As Weir’s star rose with both films getting good notices, George Miller’s first feature, Mad Max, was gaining an audience, and soon offers from Hollywood to Australians in the film industry became a, well, deluge…
NEXT TIME: We bring you a deal with the devil, where the negotiations were so engaging that the results were almost secondary…
