Title: The Last Wave

Year: 1977

Country: Australia

Language: English, Italian, Aboriginal

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

Director: Peter Weir

Screenwriters: Peter Weir, Tony Morphett, Petru Popescu

Music: Groove Myers

Cinematography: Russell Boyd

Editing: Max Lemon

Cast:

Richard Chamberlain

Olivia Hamnett

David Gulpilil

Nandjiwarra Amagula

Peter Carroll

Frederick Parslow

Vivean Gray

Wallas Eaton

Hedley Cullen

Rating: 7.0/10

There is a telling moment in Peter Weir’s third feature THE LAST WAVE, when Anne (Hamnett) descries Charlie (Amagula) standing and regarding outside her home, her knee-jerk reaction is to freak out, ordering her two young daughters to go upstairs and hide. Does that feel strange? Charlie was in her house as a dinner guest (albeit uninvited) the day before, and apparently the dinner went well if the atmosphere wasn’t particularly chummy. So even before sussing out Charlie’s motive, Anne is overpowered by mortal fear simply on account of his appearance, and why it that? I forget to mention, Anne is a Caucasian woman and Charlie is an Aborigine, so the answer is self-evident.

Oscillating between white man’s burden and the conscientious guilt of barbaric colonization, for any white filmmaker, to contend with a racially sensitive story is a double-edged task. Among the Antipodean cinema, only the recent Jennifer Kent’s THE NIGHTINGALE (2018) manages to find a felicitous formulation with a more revolutionary angle. THE LAST WAVE is made in 1977, so we couldn’t expect Weir to be too progressive in his perspective, and in fact, like PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), he is more inclined to unpick the mysticism as a way to venerate the Aborigine’s immemorial legacy and culture.

Audience’s proxy is a Sydney-based white lawyer David Burton (Chamberlain), Anne’s husband, who is inexplicably embroiled in a manslaughter case of a city Aborigine, which is not even his field, he specializes in corporate taxation. But, he is the “chosen” one because of his psychic ability of experiencing “dreamtime”, a concept believed by the tribal Aborigines, and which Weir and his co-scribes dumb down as “David has the power of foreseeing futurity in his dreams”. Aided by one of the more forthcoming aboriginal offenders, Chris (Gulpilil), David is bent on finding out why he is “special” and arouses the vigilance from the tribal shaman, the said Charlie. But eventually, in lieu of fabricating some tenuous connexion between David and the tribe, Weir chooses a more metaphysical solution, the titular apocalyptic wave that threatens to send off the entire humanity. However, it is less a cop-out than an artistic license, as the script is a cul-de-sac, there is no place for a white-bread man here.

Aurally and visually, THE LAST WAVE continues Weir’s striking applications of dissonant foley effects and meteorological special effects, like the hailstones that opens the film, or the scene of a horrific underwater premonition.

Chamberlain is a dedicative and charismatic leading man even the story short-changes his character, once his lean, handsome four-squareness is encroached by monomania, twinges of torment and despair are visualized in his face, David’s quest for the truth can retrospectively and all too easily, be read as a queer Chamberlain’s seeking out an answer of why he is not like others, and the answer is an overwhelming elemental force.

In the supporting roles, Hamnett is worth her salts as a perturbed wife, but a young Gulpilil really lights up the screen, asserts himself with effortless civility and dignity, but also excellently registers Chris’ inner turmoil when he apparently betrays his tribe, should he have been elected as our main focal point, the movie would have been a more tub-thumping curio for today’s audience.

referential entries: Weir’s WITNESS (1985, 7.1/10), PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975, 8.9/10); Fred Schepisi’s A CRY IN THE DARK (1988, 6.9/10); Jennifer Kent’s THE NIGHTINGALE (2018, 8.3/10).

The Last Wave complicate the distinction between European and Indigenous Peoples on narrative, aesthetic, and ideological levels:

The film goes back and forth between the judicial process of the colonizers and the tribal laws of the aboriginals, showing how the murder case is complicated amid two law systems. We are invited to piece together the truth with both the information we get through the lawyer and the tribal wall painting we see in the end, but these two sources of information are scrambled together, so that we can’t differentiate them. There are many scenes and images in the film that suggest this intermingling. When it rains heavily outside, which the aboriginals take as an apocalyptic sign, the lawyer’s house is also flooded with tub water. There is an interesting image early in the film where a man on the street drinks water from a tab while holding an umbrella to shield him from rainwater, suggesting the hypocrisy or ludicrousness of differentiating between the two kinds of water. The lawyer’s dream or fantasy are intercutted with real scenes to blur the line between reality and imagination, but also between the colonizers’ world of rationality and the aboriginals’ world of tribal mysteries. The aboriginal beliefs finally influence the lawyer’s recognition of self, thus fully creeping into the colonizers’ world.

However, The Last Wave still maintains dominant cultural hierarchies.

The social statuses of the colonizers and the aboriginals are not equal, with the white protagonist being a respectable lawyer, having decent suits… etc. The lawyer and his family also take up more theatrical space and time, with most stories and fantasies happening in THEIR house or THEIR court, allowing them to “play a home game” and making it easier for audience to identify with them. The reverse only happens intermittently and in the end, when the lawyer no longer has control over his own house. Over the course, only the lawyer has the ability to freeze the narrative and make us ascent into his inner world, like fantasy or dreams. The ending is an example, where we the lawyer’s meditation concludes the whole story. It’s also interesting to me that even at the end, I think the audience are still not sure of what really happens. The aboriginal culture remains a “dark continent” or a mystery, open to (colonizers’) exploration and objectification.