The Plumber (Weir, 1979): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.20pm
This screening is part of the Animus Magazine season devoted to Peter Weir. Details here.
Cine Passion review:
Peter Weir in a jocular mood turns Hanging Rock into a high-rise
complex, the oppressed return with tool belts. "You can tell a lot about
people from their bathroom." The housewife-scholar (Judy Morris) lives
surrounded by fertility masks and Kama Sutra posters, her thesis on a
New Guinea tribe is written to native drums on a tape recorder. The
surrealistic process has the witch doctor who once barged into her tent
reflected in the shaggy plumber (Ivar Kants) who contemplates the
perfectly organized lavatory and begins hammering away at the tiled
walls. The tradesman is an insinuating physical presence ("The drains of
this building are clogged with hair," he whispers as if telling a lewd
secret), a playful lout, a wannabe balladeer, a trickster. He's also a
reminder of class injustice, the client's status becomes her weapon—when
she makes a point of correcting his grammar in front of a friend, he
channels his fury into faux-Bob Dylan lyrics. The brain-eating malady
and the vanished watch, theme and style, "pressure." A comedy of menace
and control à la Pinter, where privileged guilt and fear unmoor
the anthropological mind until it resembles the cracked plaster above
the toilet. From within the jungle of tangled pipes and scaffolding the
accusatory Other wails with guitar and harmonica, a matter of leakage.
Weir calibrates this Last Wave offshoot with compressed technique (it was shot on the fly for Australian TV) and material from Polanski's The Tenant and Del Lord's A Plumbing We Will Go. "It's a wonder the place hasn't flooded!" The discourse continues in Pacific Heights, The Guardian, Funny Games.
Fernando F. Croce
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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