Peter Weir knows how to open a film. Remember the 30th Street Station murder in Witness? Remember Jeff Bridges walking through the corn fields with a baby in his arms in Fearless?

While both opening are magnificent, they pale in comparison to the opening minutes of Weir's 1977 mini-masterpiece The Last Wave. Rather than conjuring up a plot point integral to the progression of the film, Weir opens with an unexplained event that would be perplexing on its own, but is merely the first clue in a string of mysterious occurrences that can only point to the coming apocalypse.

Before his first scene, Weir actually roles the credits over a beautifully composed shot of an aboriginal shaman sitting in meditation it's a long telephoto shot and the shaman appears to be perfectly wedged into an outcropping of rock and perfectly set against the sky. Is Weir suggesting that these aboriginal leaders have a unique position at one with nature? Of course he is. Because for the first twenty minutes of The Last Wave nearly every sign and gesture of the film has symbolic resonance, which allows Weir to blend the real and figurative as the film progresses.

Following the credits, Weir takes us to a mixed school in the heart of the outback. It's a sunny, arid day with clear blue skies and the children are out playing cricket in the school yard, when suddenly thunder can be heard in the distance. The kids scan the horizon, but there's no evidence of an impending storm, until the thunder comes closer. And closer. And the rains begin. First it's a torrential downpour on a sunny day, but then the baseball sized hail begins to smash windows. And then, just as simply, the hail stops. And the rain stops. And the sun remains out.

That school and those children never return again. But the central underlying mystery of the film is established — something weird is happening with the weather.

Cut, then, to Richard Chamberlain's David Burton, who is presented as quite possibly the most buttoned-down square lawyer in the world. How above the fray is Burton? Weir follows his car into the streets of Sydney, where rain has produced traffic jams punctuated with horns and swearing and then he cuts into Burton's car. Total silence. A hermetically sealed environment where the only noise is the windshield wipers sweeping up and down. Burton returns home to his perfect blond wife (Olivia Hamnet) and his adorable children. Again, he seems to be above whatever's happening in the world around him. Until...

There's water pouring down his steps. The weather from outside, the horrible misplaced weather, is entering his life. But it's all a tease, you see, because his kids have left the bathtub running and that's all that's caused the leak. But when David goes to train the tub, he puts his hand over the drain, feeling the pull — whatever's happening in the outside world... it's about to suck David in.

As I said, it's all symbolic. Every shot. Every action. It's building to a point...

We discover that David is haunted by bad dreams. Horrible, prophetic dreams. But how do those dreams relate to five aborigines who are charged with murder, a case that David was handed even though he's just a tax attorney. Well, to begin with, one of the defendants, Chris (Walkabout's David Gulpilil), has been making periodic appearances in David's dreams. So if he doesn't know what's happening, Chris's friend, the elder wiseman Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula) just might. Is David Burton somehow related to the peculiar weather? And will things get worse before they get better? Well, duh. Soon it's raining frogs and raining gasoline, and, well, there's talk of a big wave a-comin' and that's never good.

The Last Wave, beyond being about law, dreams, and mystery, is really about a clash of cultures and how two cultures that live side-by-side day in and day out can actually know virtually nothing about each other. But that's not actually fair, the Aboriginals know plenty about the white men, but that knowledge is not reciprocated, which is actually a traditional sociological pattern of minorities passing within a mainstream culture — the minority know the ways of the majority because it's a necessary way of life. The majority, the group with the power, has no need to understand the minority because they control them. They either manifest this control through outright hatred (Jim Crow laws or apartheid) or through condescension (pretty much the alternative the rest of the time). Chamberlain's character has been brought onto the murder case because of the rumors that he's sympathetic to the Aboriginal cause, but he doesn't actually know anything about the people. He sits at home reading National Geographic style books in the hopes that that will lead to understanding, but clearly it can't. Even everyday contact with the Aboriginals hasn't given the film's other white characters any kind of understanding. They see the Aboriginal people as a reified group with a simplified set of beliefs that they (the white folks) ignore as being merely superstition. They accept that at one point the Aboriginals had a living religion and tribal ways, but that once cities destroyed their native grounds they just became a part of the Angelo world (albeit a struggling part) without any residual traces of their own cultures. The party line is that there are still some "Tribal" Aborigines thousands of miles away, in the outback, but that all of the Aborigines in the city are "Domesticated." Oh, stupid white men!

Because when things get spooky or confusing, the White Man tries to rationalize with empty religion and false science. Meteorologists attempt to pass off the unusual weather as caused by a surprise low pressure system and the black rain as caused by pollution, but who's being reductive and superstitious now? There are, you see, some things better explained with spiritualism than with science and some things better explained by a "primitive" religion than by "established" ones. Whereas Christianity uses God to explain away all of the confusing aspects of the world, the Aboriginal religion accepts the possibility of other things. Once Chamberlain's character has become extremely troubled by the things he's seen, he approaches his reverend/ step-father and says, "Why didn't you tell me there were mysteries?" It's a valid question and mostly, The Last Wave spends its running time making the argument that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most of our philosophies.

Weir is masterful at creating this vision of Australian society on the brink. The screen is full of signs and symbols and riddles and most of them are only tangentially related to what could reductively be called the plot — the white lawyer defending the aborigines charged with murder. In fact, the actual trial takes up only minutes of screentime and the murder is only explained to us in the vaguest way — the dead man wanted tribal knowledge that he was unprepared to receive and according to the dictates of tribal law he had to die because, as the film puts it, in this culture, the law is more important than the man (in contrast to the Anglo judicial system in which, hypothetically, laws are bent to suit the man). The murder and the alienating trial are merely signpost events, events that could be possible in this confused dreamworld.

It's tough to know, then, how exactly to categorize The Last Wave. It has aspects of the legal thriller, aspects of a supernatural thriller, aspects of a supernatural horror movie and then there's Weir's style of poetic realism hanging over all of it. The divergent tones and styles are captured by cinematographer Russell Boyd (who shot all of Weir's films leading up to Year of Living Dangerously and appears to be reuniting with the director on the upcoming Master and Commander). Boyd films Sydney and the Outback as spaces on the verge of fantasy. The distinction is made between "real time" and "dream time," but I suspect that most of this film exists somewhere in the middle. And everything is dominated (and moved into deeper oddness) by Charles Wain's amelodic didgeridoo score.

The performance styles are also appropriately mixed. Chamberlain's modulated gentility stands off from Gulpilil and Amagula's unstudied naturalism. As Chamberlain's character becomes more and more involves in the tribal Aboriginal world, he loses the facade and mannered ways and he resorts to something primal.

The Last Wave doesn't *quite* make it to its finale unscathed. The film's climactic trip into Sydney's tribal underground (literally through the sewers) never really explains itself beyond the fact that, well, they had to go somewhere. And I'm not surely sure where the film's end leaves Chamberlain, spiritually speaking. But as a mood piece, The Last Wave is certainly work seeing. There's more depth to Weir's nightmare vision than the makers of the American remake of The Ring could have even hoped to bring to theirs...


*******
DVD NOTES: The Last Wave is available on a Criterion DVD, which means that the image quality is fantastic. Just a wonderful widescreen transfer. However, the film's dialogue mix is really really quiet, which gets annoying after a while because when the sound mix gets loud right after you pumped the volume up for dialogue, that gets really obnoxious. The extras are also fairly minimal. There's a great ten minute chat with Peter Weir, but it would have been nice to have heard even more of his thoughts on the film in a full-length commentary. But I'm not gonna complain too too much.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD