Directors As Writers. - Review - movie reviews

Commonweal, June 20, 1997 by Richard Alleva

Beresford's `Road' & Lumet's `Night'

Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road is about the struggle of female prisoners-of-war--Brits, Dutch, Australians, a few Americans and Asians, and one German Jew--to stay alive and to remain civilized in a Japanese POW camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Before the film is ten minutes under way, it becomes clear that scriptwriter Beresford understands director Beresford very well, caters to his strengths, incites his visual power, and, when need be, keeps out of his way.

Beresford writes good, flavorsome, pointed dialogue. Example: When Japanese officers tempt some of the starving women to prostitute themselves for food and softer living conditions, and one of them steps forward in capitulation, the unofficial leader of the women (Glenn Close) intercepts her by saying, "Don't be absurd." Obviously Close could have uttered something like, "Don't lower yourself," but "absurd" is the mot juste. To sell one's body for the sake of preserving one's body is for her unthinkable, impossible, absurd. One adjective encapsulates a code of honor.

But though Beresford has done skillful adaptations of plays such as Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant, he has never been a photographer of talking heads. He continues to write--with images--long after the dialogue stops. And, as viewers of Black Robe know, this filmmaker has a pronounced talent for visualizing the extremes of cruelty and compassion. In Paradise Road, this talent is unstintingly on tap in service to the movie's theme: beauty as preservation and certification of sanity and civilization in the face of unremitting cruelty.

The rigors of the POW camp are searingly presented. Always we are kept aware that any moment of respite from labor--a quick nap, a brief chat--can be canceled by blows or much worse. Beresford can wrest horrible beauty from the most egregious sights. When an Asian woman is burnt alive for illicitly obtaining quinine for the sick, her body, for one heartstopping instant, seems to plunge out from the flames like a surfer riding a wave. But the director refuses to end this excruciating scene on a note of mere shock. Our last sight of the execution is an extreme long shot with the camera looking down on the camp and taking in the beauty of the surrounding Sumatran landscape. The very gorgeousness of nature rebukes the cruelty of mankind.

But beauty in this film does more than rebuke. Assisted by a missionary friend who's had musical training, Close drafts several of the inmates into performing works by Elgar, Dvorak, Ravel, and other composers. This enterprise could have been portrayed entirely as an example of British pluck, for so it is, but both Beresford and Close insist on much more. Close, conducting her "vocal orchestra" (not a choir, as she firmly insists), seems to sculpt the lovely sounds in the air with her hands. The faces of the singing women are so intent on the precision the music needs that we feel these captives--trammeled by filth and brute force--have momentarily attained transcendence. Some guards, rushing up as usual to break up any assemblage, stop in their tracks as the first notes of the first concert are sounded. These brutalized and brutalizing men have been virtually smitten by beauty and are soon sitting on the ground to drink in more of the voluptuousness. After witnessing so much cruelty and squalor, we too drink it in. We too are smitten.

The actresses in this film, without exception, respond to Beresford's direction with the same devotion that the prisoners bring to the music. Of all leading American film actresses, Glenn Close has turned out to be the best steward of her own talent, finding role after role in the last decade that forced her to take talent-stretching risks. (Meryl Streep, an even greater actress than Close, has had no such luck.) Close's almost too perfectly chiseled, high-cheekboned face, a bit given to smugness in her earlier roles, here believably takes on the radiance of a woman battling hatred and death with discipline and love. Elizabeth Spriggs, a reliable portrayer of stuffed shirts on the British stage for three decades, delicately limns one more, but this time with a heart embedded in the stuffing. Frances McDormand amazed me with her portrayal of an ambiguous German doctor, blending compassion and steeliness as she did in Fargo but with an acrid flavor of Mitteleuropa that can't come easily to an American actress. If it is to be regretted that some of the supporting roles are insufficiently written, at least the actresses in them make us want to know these women better. And a special accolade must go to the Asian actor (alas, I don't have his name) who plays the camp interpreter. Without much help from the script, he makes it clear that his character is a humane intellectual pressed into abetting a savagery that every cell in his body knows is wrong. This performance is an example of the actor as writer.

And Bruce Beresford is an example of the director as poet. Though a master of spectacle (an aerial attack on a transport ship is an inducement to fibrillation), he is really at his best using the resources of film to impinge upon the nearly inexpressible. When the women are being driven from their camp to a more remote one in the face of MacArthur's advance, their convoy passes the Japanese officers' quarters, in front of which, taking lunch, are those former camp inmates who accepted the bribery of relative comfort and are now concubines. They look dazed and alienated from themselves. But does Beresford cross-cut from concubines to resolute captives in order to italicize the shame of the former? No. Instead, he overlaps shots of one group with the other and merges the two. The meaning of this? I offer only my interpretation, for this scene has the rich ambiguity of poetry. No moral parity is suggested; clearly the women who refused prostitution made the harder, better choice. (You can see this acknowledged in the faces of women in both groups.) Nevertheless, there is a ghostly sense of sisterhood here. All have been abused, all in some sense manhandled, and all long for escape and home. Now they all meet for the first time in nearly two years and some for the very last time on earth. Since they cannot physically embrace, Beresford magically, cinematically, lets them mingle. This is film artistry of a high order, executed with finesse and informed by compassion.