The Year of Living Dangerously

Peter Weir, Australia, 1982, 115 minutes

Peter Weir's first American-financed film started the genre of journalists entangled in the violence and politics of Third Worid countries with oppressive military regimes: the genre that gave us Salvador, Under Fire and The Killing Fields. The Year Of Living Dangerously stands as the best of these and deserves to be considered as one of the key films of the 8Os.

Australian journalist Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) arrives in Indochina in 1965: it is his first overseas assignment and he wants to do well. Adopted by diminutive photographer Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt) he is introduced to British consular official (Sigourney Weaver) with whom he promptly falls in love. She gives him secret information regarding an arms shipment to the Communists so that they can escape the predicted war together, but Hamilton uses the information for an exclusive story and is put on the Communists' death-list...

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this film is the performance by actress Linda Hunt (who appeared in Pret-A-Porter) as the male half-Chinese half-Australian Billy Kwan, for which she duly won an Oscar. Kwan is the Tolstoy-quoting social conscience of the film and appears as a cipher for Weir's oriental values and mystical elements. His androgynous quality gives the film an extra layer of symbolic meaning. TYOLD deals effectively with themes of nationality (both Hamilton and Kwan are only half Australian) and betrayal (Hamilton's betrayal of Jill and Kwan, and Sukharto's betrayal of Kwan and the other Indochinese); it is apolitical in that the central communist character is portrayed sympathetically, and Gibson successfully avoids turning his character into a macho red-blooded Aussie male.

TYOLD has none ofthe rawness of Salvador but it avoids the didacticity of Stone's film: its purpose is to tell a love story whereas Stone wants to point the waggling finger at American foreign policy. Both films excel at showing the irrationality of war but in entirely different ways.

Review by Stephen Cox
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96