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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