Review: Balibo, From Paris with Love, Gone With the Woman and Silent Wedding

In October 1975, the obscure little Portuguese colony of East Timor was giv­en inde­pend­ence after 400 years of European rule. A mixed Melanesian/Polynesian pop­u­la­tion was sit­ting on rich min­er­al and fossil fuel poten­tial and sur­roun­ded on three sides by the region’s power­house, Indonesia (with Australia to the south). After only nine days of inde­pend­ence, Indonesia invaded in one of the most cyn­ic­al and bru­tal land grabs in mod­ern history.

The Indonesian armed forces, know­ing that an inva­sion was a gross breach of inter­na­tion­al law, wore plain clothes and did everything they could to extin­guish evid­ence and wit­nesses. The most cel­eb­rated vic­tims of the atro­city were the Balibo 5, young Australian tele­vi­sion journ­al­ists who were stran­ded in the bor­der town of Balibo as the inva­sion began. Without the bene­fit of modern-day com­mu­nic­a­tions, they simply dis­ap­peared and the Australian gov­ern­ment, who (along with the US) gave tacit approv­al to the entire hor­rible exercise.

Balibo, the fea­ture film, is the story of the Balibo 5 told through the eyes of former cru­sad­ing journ­al­ist (now on the skids) Roger East, played by Anthony LaPaglia. East arrives in Dili just before the inva­sion (the Balibo 5 dis­ap­peared while the Indonesians were still indul­ging in ter­ri­fy­ing bor­der skir­mishes) and, with the help of Timorese lead­er (now President) José Ramos-Horta he searches for the truth until the Indonesians stop him, too, from telling the world what happened.

The Balibo atro­city, and the Indonesian inva­sion of Timor, gets a suit­ably power­ful cine­mat­ic por­tray­al in Robert Connolly’s excel­lent film and heavy­weight LaPaglia has nev­er been bet­ter as the conscience-stricken hack who becomes the only link to the out­side world. If I had any tiny cri­ti­cism it might be that the film skates around the com­pli­city of the Australian gov­ern­ment in the deaths of the journ­al­ists (there is one brief sug­ges­tion that Australia actu­ally aler­ted the Indonesians to their pres­ence), but for the most part Balibo is essen­tial view­ing – pas­sion­ate and moving.

Luc Besson has made a good liv­ing churn­ing out high energy European B movies (mostly dumb, like The Transporter, occa­sion­ally excel­lent, like Taken) but he must have run out of nap­kins to write From Paris with Love on because it is really very thin indeed. Simpering Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a US dip­lo­mat in Paris, moon­light­ing for the CIA. He gets a sud­den pro­mo­tion when wild­card secret agent John Travolta comes to town and needs a mind­er. Travolta chews any and all scenery he can get his hands on and is com­pletely out of the con­trol of dir­ect­or Pierre Morel who had bet­ter luck with dis­cip­lined Liam Neeson in Taken last year.

Due to a ward­robe mal­func­tion on my part I had to watch this film through my (pre­scrip­tion) sunglasses. Frankly, I would have pre­ferred some­thing even more opaque, like a shower cur­tain or the wall of the cinema next door while it played a com­pletely dif­fer­ent film.

Gone With the Woman is a deeply unfunny com­edy from Norway about a young man whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of a high-spirited young lady in his life. With the help of some wise old geez­ers at the loc­al sauna he tries to cope with her eccent­ri­cit­ies, incon­sist­en­cies and her deeply annoy­ing, and at the same time, com­pletely unreal­ist­ic, beha­viours. Borderline miso­gyn­ist­ic at best and dir­ec­ted like an expens­ive Heineken tv com­mer­cial spun out to an hour and a half, I have to say it did look quite hand­some on the Paramount’s new hi-def digit­al pro­ject­or (even if they hadn’t bothered to get the ratio exactly right).

I’m not sure what to say about the pecu­li­ar Silent Wedding, a Romanian com­edy set in the 1950s. The bucol­ic rur­al exist­ence of a vil­lage full of “char­ac­ters” is upset when the death of Stalin almost puts a stop to a big vil­lage wed­ding. Instead of can­cel­ling they decide to hold the wed­ding in silence (hence the title) which leads to an amus­ing cent­ral set-piece that Chaplin might have con­struc­ted. My prob­lem was that they were all so bois­ter­ous and noisy (and broad in the act­ing sense) in the first half that I couldn’t wait for them to shut up which I don’t think was the point.

It being Romanian, the com­edy is black­er than pitch and is bookended by a grim, grey mod­ern scene inten­ded to con­trast with the golden sum­mer tones of the main story. I thought it was all a bit heavy-handed to be honest.

My New Year’s res­ol­u­tion is to go to more than one screen­ing at the Film Society this year. I love the Society and its year round com­mit­ment to film art and they have respon­ded to some cri­ti­cism of last year’s pro­gramme with a resur­gence in cel­lu­loid over DVD – not the least of which is a 35mm present­a­tion of Billy Wilder’s time­less clas­sic Some Like It Hot (cour­tesy of the MGM Channel).

There are the usu­al fas­cin­at­ing pro­grammes sup­plied by the French Government and the Goethe Institute from Germany, a series of films from Iran includ­ing the won­der­ful The White Balloon (although no Crimson Gold, my favour­ite Iranian film of the last dec­ade), Tarkovsky’s great mas­ter­piece Stalker plus Astaire and Rogers in Swing Time. I have to wait until November for my per­son­al high­light: Bogart and Bacall togeth­er for the first time in To Have and Have Not, one of the great cel­lu­loid romances and twice the film that Casablanca ever was. “You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips togeth­er and blow.” Heaven.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 3 March, 2010.

Added bonus: Here is that fam­ous line delivered by the gor­geous Bacall when she was only 19.