Rabbit-Proof Fence (93 mins, PG) Directed by Phillip Noyce; starring Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury, Laura Monaghan, Kenneth Branagh
Avalon (106 mins, 12A) Directed by Mamoru Oshii; starring Malgorzata Foremniak, Bartek Swiderski
Orange County (82 mins, 12A) Directed by Jake Kasdan; starring Colin Hanks, Jack Black, Schuyler Fisk
In the heroic early days of Australian cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the country's rising filmmakers were scrutinising their land and its history, almost every leading director made a movie about the heritage and plight of the Aborigines. One thinks of Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Bruce Beresford's The Fringe Dwellers. Now Phillip Noyce, one of the great directors of that period, who made Backroads (1977), an account of racial oppression in Australia, has returned home after 12 years making genre pieces in Hollywood to direct Rabbit-Proof Fence, a forceful attack on a terrible, little publicised case of injustice.
In 1901 the Australian government built a transcontinental fence in Western Australia to contain the exploding population of rabbits that the white settlers had introduced. Not too long after, in a case of eugenics gone mad (if indeed eugenics could get any madder), the government introduced a scheme by which all mixed-race children were taken away from their Aboriginal mothers to be raised as good Christian Australians, the Aboriginal part bred out of them through two generations of enforced marriage to whites. This practice apparently continued until the 1970s, and Noyce's film is the true tale of its impact on one poverty-stricken family in 1931, when three little girls, each with a different itinerant white father who'd worked on the rabbit-proof fence, were taken away from their mother and sent to be reared at a special school 1,500 miles away.
The story concerns their escape and heroic journey home and the people they meet on the way, including an Aborigine maid who is the enforced mistress of a white farmer. The children use the fence as a guide, and Noyce doesn't stress the irony and symbolism. It's a gripping, unsentimental tale; the awesomely bare landscape is beautifully photographed by Christopher Doyle, the gifted Sydney-born cameraman who works mostly in Hong Kong; and there's a haunting score by Peter Gabriel. One of their reluctant pursuers is an Aborigine tracker played by David Gulpilil, an iconic figure in Australian cinema since his appearance in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout . There is also a chilling performance by Kenneth Branagh as AO Neville, the chief protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, who goes about his business with the detached thoroughness of the character called 'The Jew Detector' in Max Frisch's play Andorra. 'They don't appreciate what we're doing for them,' says the exasperated Neville.
Avalon, the live-action debut of the Japanese animator Mamoru Oshii, is a hypnotic science-fiction picture made in Poland and set in a dystopian near future. The film's title refers both to the mystical land where ancient warriors like King Arthur found eternal rest and to a virtual-reality war game played by the disillusioned young, in which they sit in dentists' chairs with grim hair-dryers pulled over their heads and engage in battles with tanks, helicopters and ferocious juggernauts.
Winners go on to further stages of the game; losers - especially those who encounter a ghost in the machine in the form of a diaphanous little angel - end up in the mad house. The picture concentrates on one contestant, the cool, good-looking Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak), and her progress of mysterious self-discovery, and it's beautifully designed and lit, most of it in a golden sepia. At times the use of music is reminiscent of Krzysztof Kieslowski, but the pictures it most closely resembles in mood and appearance are Chris Marker's La Jetée and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker .
Jake Kasdan's ambivalent comedy Orange County inevitably brings to mind a famous quip by the great vaudevillian Fred Allen: 'California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange.' A grim joke for liberals, the eponymous southern Los Angeles county is home to the John Wayne Airport, the West Coast headquarters of the John Birch Society and the largest collection of right-wing reactionaries in the world. But it's the hedonistic aspect of the place - surfing, partying and Dis neyland - that Kasdan has in mind, and from which his naïve high-school hero, Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks), intends to escape. His vision of the possibilities of life are changed when he discovers on the beach a Catcher in the Rye-style novel by a teacher at Stanford University way up in liberal Northern California. So he writes a novella called Orange County, satirising his dysfunctional family and his dim peers, and applies to Stanford. When he's turned down as a result of the actions of his school's deranged careers teacher, he lays siege to Stanford but eventually learns that the bluebird of happiness lives in Orange County.
The film has amusing moments early on, but it's a painfully complacent piece for a 26-year-old director to be making, and a sickly cocktail of philistine adolescent humour and would-be satire. Kasdan, who made a much superior debut with Zero Effect a few years back, is the son of writer-director Lawrence Kasdan; the film's central duo are played by Tom Hanks's son and Sissy Spacek's daughter, and the cast includes brief performances (some uncredited) by their parents' friends and associates, among them Garry Marshall, Kevin Kline, Harold Ramis, Lily Tomlin, Ben Stiller and Chevy Chase. They seem to be having a lot of fun.
