Capital Celluloid 2023 — Day 264: Fri Sep 22

The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir, 1982): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.15pm


This 35mm presentation is also screened on September 13th with an introduction by Elena Lazic of Animus Magazine.

Time Out review:
Bedeviled by much-publicised script wrangles (between Weir and source novelist Christopher Koch) and production difficulties (death threats to the crew on location in the Philippines), this bears too many signs of compromise betokening an at least partly US financed project. Mel Gibson is adequate as the Aussie news journalist on assignment in the turbulent Indonesia of late 1965, teamed up romantically with the assistant to the British military attaché (Sigourny Weaver), and professionally with a dwarf Chinese-Australian camera-man (actress Linda Hunt, extraordinary as the movie's Tolstoy-quoting social conscience). Weir's steamy atmospherics often have the camera standing in for the unwelcome, uncomprehending Westerner in South East Asia to impressive effect; but the delineation of the political forces at work in the last days of Sukarno's regime is often less than clear. The result is a curiously languid affair, rather than the breathless Costa-Gavras-style thriller which was the least one might have expected from this kind of material.
Rod McShane

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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