Year of Living Dangerously

STILL SWEATILICIOUS

Scene after dark scene after darker, more humid scene—bring along the wiper-attached night specs—you admire the fevered touches Peter Weir brings to his vision of third world hell in The Year of Living Dangerously. Based on C.J. Koch’s award-winning novel about an Australian journalist’s pursuit for the next front page scoop during the buildup of the attempted 1965 Communist coup of the Sukarno dictatorship in Indonesia, the movie, filmed in the Philippines and budgeted at around 6 mil, summons up the atmosphere almost too well—you can get mighty depressed as you view the expanses of privation, the polluted waters, the westernized whores waiting for the foreign press at a local cemetery, the random brutalities of insurgency and martial law. Weir doesn’t have an explicit agenda; in fact, he intentionally avoids the aftermath of the aborted coup: starting on September 30, 1965, the ensuing blood bath took the lives of between 300,000 and 400,000 Indonesians. What Weir does is brave enough: he injects the boiling revolution with jackuped romance and tawdry newspaper competitors. Unlike Under Fire, in which journalists commit the gravest sin by becoming involved and taking sides in Central American political wars, and unlike The Killing Fields, wherein N.Y.Times reporter Sydney Schanberg suffers a case of the weepy guilts over leaving his Cambodian buddy behind to endure the Khmer Rouge, Weir sets up a compelling endangerment affecting reporter Mel Gibson, British attaché Sigourney Weaver and beloved as well as meddlesome local freak chronicler Linda Hunt, the first and third marked for death by Sukarno’s goons and probably the communists.

When Living Dangerously was released in 1983 and Hunt won accolades, including the Oscar, for playing straight the dwarfy male Billy, some of us weren’t unfair but reserved about the performance because we had been overdosing on one sex playing another—as in Tootsie, Yentl, Victor/Victoria, The World According to Garp. Those reversals deliberate and comic; in Hunt’s case, there’s no intended capriccio as this is sober stuff, and she got the part not only because she had unique physical limits, there really wasn’t any male actor available who had the voice as gift for authoritative moral elocution. Minus all the publicity back then, her portrayal is far more than a director’s gamble; though a slight betrayal to gender when hearing her reading the wording of an invitation to a swanky soirée, Hunt’s Billy is complex hero as eunuch with cauliflower ears and a bad hair cut accentuating the Asian, having the face of Gale Sondergaard cross-pollinated with Leonard Nimoy. Dressed in print shirts with large pockets filled with camera stock to downplay breasts, she’s never ludicrous—not even when dancing with Sigourney Weaver to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” (The soundtrack’s classics accompanying her scenes are incongruous-to-the-setting perfect: “September” from Strauss’s Four Last Songs, performed by Kirite Kanawa, and excerpts of “L’Enfant” from Opera Sauvage.) Watching Hunt in a role of a lifetime, she earns the right to steal the picture but she doesn’t, or more precisely she can’t. No one could—not when co-starring with Gibson and Weaver as two sexy numbers, both of whom give great sweats.

With youthful petulance, wearing skinny, limply knotted ties and Aussie beach shades, Gibson’s the image of our worst fears about neophyte journalists—thoughtless gunga newshounds. Yet there’s no denying the power of his looks: the beauty disarms defenses and at the same time loads fantasies which back in ’83, and evidently lasting for a while, manifested into nocturnal emissions. Meeting him for the first time at pool side, Weaver lowers her sunglasses to get a better view in his swim suit; when Hunt solicits a comment, she responds, “Cheeky.” Stopping by Gibson’s office later, she checks him out once again—taking a quick below-the-belt glance noticed by the audience. On what is their initial unintended date, they sip as drink something red-colored, during which he’s being boyishly insolent. Suddenly thunder is heard and the rains start pouring down and the camera moves to their overwhelmingly healthy faces cracking into mile-wide smiles. Jumping into a car to protect themselves, holding glasses now filled with a green concoction, immersed in contagious laughter, the steam between them begins to engulf. We have to wait a bit for the first smooch—a nod to the pent-up sneakiness of Liz & Monty in A Place in the Sun. Defying curfews and roadblocks, they speed passed a blaze of automatic weapon fire, so gloriously giddy with lust unspent they can’t keep their hands off each another. (Diplomatic Djakarta stops betting when the duo will mate, confirmed by one envious journalist who jests to Gibson, “You’re looking a little pooped, kid.”) Weaver’s like-no-tomorrow chin matches the on-screen bulk—in scenes with a towel the face and body have an Amazonian hugeness and looks as if she could easily squash leanly, runty Mel. One of those vagabond career types, her Plain Jane puts class in foreign service and parlays criticism into something constructive: smarting over at her comment that one of his pieces could do without the “melodrama,” he returns to the tape recording of it and realizes he does sound like (an unmentioned) Tennessee Williams on a sap-sucking downer. Their eros paramountly comestible, Weaver and Gibson should receive some mention for at least being plausible as actors, too, despite her poor British accent—sounding as if it’s a trial run for a vocal coach to measure its deficiencies—and, despite gleamy shines as a trophy trick, his reporter’s deficient sense of peril stays fearless.

Bolstered by the haunting social conscience of Hunt’s Billy, the chaos and horror of approaching genocide, Maurice Jarre’s Vangelis-in-the-tropics score, mixing third world exotic with an Anglo eroticism, there’s deep pleasure in saluting as reconfirmation almost thirty five years after opening that The Year of Living Dangerously is Weir’s most fervid accomplishment.

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