Peter Weir, 1975
So I've been having this sort of crisis (augmented by being sick, which together explain the lack of posts the past week or so) I think, brought on by watching pretty much four movies a day for about ten days. It got to a point where I was watching things solely for the sake of getting through them, and I couldn't properly focus on anything. And it had been so long since I'd really fallen in love with a movie -- you know the feeling i mean? -- that it led me to question whether all the truly fantastic movies were already discovered (this also from a disappointment with my Netflix suggestions of late) only to be rewatched. Couple this with the fact that I've been watching a lot of TV that I've really been loving (I've also been re-watching things, which may factor in here), so it had me questioning this whole project and whether it was really worth it.
I won't say that this movie changed everything, but it had all the elements to get me going: mystery, a period setting, repression to overcome. (Part of the problem is that I ruined it for myself: I have this bad habit of opening the Wikipedia page for the film while I'm still watching it, so I accidentally read the ending before I saw it.) Had this not happened, and had I been able to properly focus, I might very well had fallen in love.
I have to say that I did find something off-putting at first, namely the characters of many of the girls. They exhibit this kind of articulated, though not entirely unpleasant, notion of femininity. I found myself asking, "Were women really like this 110 years ago?" But that set-up is integral to the unraveling that follows.
The film is utterly gorgeous and Weir maintains a slow, hypnotic pace by spacing out scenes with shots of wild Australian nature, which represents the tension between the earth and its feminine mysteries and the rational masculinist civilization that seeks (ineffectually) to explain and control it. (In setting up this dichotomy, the film very much echoes Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes.) Many shots in this one are so beautiful, so artfully composed, that they make you think you're looking at a gorgeous oil painting come to life. In addition, Weir uses a lot of askew angles to create feelings of uncertainty and anxiety.
I got caught in a Wikipedia loop the other day (that ever happen to you) and I ended up reading a lot about alcoholic British actresses who seem to have been driven to suicide by their relationships with men. In this way I came across the story of Rachel Roberts, who plays the headmistress here. It's a truly wonderful piece of work: she manages to be formidable and stanuch and grotesque all the while maintaining sensitivity and humanity. I was also impressed by Margaret Nelson's intense yet nuanced portrayal of the grave Sara.
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