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Show Australian films lead the pack in international showcase A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only by Itobiu Munich Ail Unsuitable Job for a Woman In a moody reflection on greed and enmity director Christopher Petit unravels a British parlor mystery adapted from a novel by P.D. James. Inexperienced but plucky Cordelia Gray (Pitta Guard) takes on a suicide investigation after her boss does himself in at his seedy London detective agency. The son of a rich businessman (Paul Freeman) is found hanged from the kitchen rafter of a dilapidated country house. A spooky, severe family retainer (Billie Whitelaw) hires her to find out why. As she probes the boy's final days she becomes obsessed with him to the point of sliding her toothbrush in to the glass beside his and recording her goodnights to him on her cassette player. Risks become real as, against a backdrop of melancholy sunsets and dawns, she is thrown into a well, chases ghostly maniacal laughter through empty halls, nearly asphyxiates as-phyxiates herself with the killing hook and belt and herself commits a murder-by-drowning. Her obsession with the dead boy seems silly and unconvincing ("I always want what I can't have," she admits), given the slight trail of clues (mostly tubes of purple lipstick and faceless photographs) that are the substance of his reality for her. And the plight of the frustrated real mother seems too desperate to have survived 20-some years without some earlier violence (a gunshot on a bridge, not in a parlor, ends the tragedy). But the action i tense at times (although Cordelia's search through the gloomy house is accompanied by some overly-threatening music) and Andrew contributes a nasty character char-acter to the tale. Discovering the circumstances of this murder without merry np. parent ly is suitable work for a . woman, but as a film it might not suit mystery buffs who like their whodunits convincing as well as lovely to look at. Mosquito on the Tenth Floor If your idea of Japanese film is the sci-fi fun of dripping monsters wading out of the Sea of Japan this movie won't amuse you. Its star (and screenwriter), rock-and-roller Yuya Uchida, billed here as a "comic screen presence" is anything but. A divorced, alienated cop who has failed his promotional exam and after 20 years on the force is still unable to buy a car, gets into debt as his ex-wife demands support for their extortionate daughter and herself and, for companionship, buys a home computer. As menacing loan sharks, mo-hawked mo-hawked street toughs dancing the twist (this is modern Japan in 1983?) and unsympathetic fellow cops bully him, the policeman makes the rounds of big-city sleaze joints, ludicrously, on a bike, visiting the Edo River speedboat races to gamble, the ironically-named Hero Bar to get drunk and his government high-rise apartment to pull the clothes off a series of whimpering but willing women (a repeated motif is the cop's bleak climb up a twisting set of echoing stairs clinging to his building's blank exterior). Pushed beyond despair into desperation, the cop attempts to rob a bank (defying his professional precept "protect the citizen" as he slaps around the goggle-eyed staff) and, grinning dementedly. is subdued sub-dued by a phalanx of his colleagues protected by full-body shields (he has a gun but only waves it around). It's not only an unfunny movie, it's oppressing. There're more bugs in it than the "mosquito" on the tenth floor. I ' ' .Moving Out Vince Colosimo won the Australian Austra-lian Film Critics award for most promising young actor of 1984 in a film that explores a teenager's "moving out" from adolescence into maturing understanding. Gino lives with his Italian-immigrant Italian-immigrant family in Melbourne's inner city uneasily, because as they seek to maintain their Old-world roots, he engages everything Aussie (he even has to translate his teacher's unfavorable comments for his credulous, sweet-faced father). Vjth his buddies, street-tough Allan and dashing Renato, Gino snatches emblems off cars, cheers as the school privy bums and sheepishly sheep-ishly ends up in the precinct station as his even-newer emigre cousin Maria works a softening influence on him and his art (he cherishes a sculptured fist ) becomes important to him. In a classic growing-up tale that has been compared to "The Karate Kid," director Michael Pattinson gives his young cast some memorable mem-orable moments (fat, flamboyant Helen skittering skirtless out of a high-class house; Renato in an over-the-counter exchange with doelike doe-like Maria in the family grocery, or running a comb through his hair in the reflection of a providential copper pan; and the cloddish, pot-sitting schoolboy saying a last goodbye to Gino as he leaves his school). But the grownups make solid contributions too. The poetry-pushing poetry-pushing "sir" is decent though a giant pain, intentionally; the art teacher you initially think is tarty is able to talk to a 16-year-old like an ally; and the curly-haired young school supervisor takes the boys in hand with undefeated likability and strength. There's lots to like in "Moving Out " You'll wish it didn't move on quite so fast. i , Between Wars As the Michael Thomhill-directed Australian film opens in the trenches of France in 1918 you think you're in for 90 minutes of Monty Python humor (a loutish officer barks at a dispirited doughboy mired in half a foot of mud to "get cleaned up, soldier," and a hookah-smoking "super" heads the asylum). But as young Dr. Edward Trenbow (Colin Redgrave) pursues a hapless career vs. the conservative Royal Commission, laughter degenerates into pity. Influenced by German prisoner-of-war Dr. Schneider, a practitioner of Freudian theories, Trenbow becomes be-comes an unwilling "pioneer" of Australian psychoanalysis (the childhood-genital precepts of the Viennese Vien-nese "sex nut" are not yet embraced by the medical establishment). He sinks into alcoholism and lethargy in a country backwater whose farmers and fishermen are ravaged by the depression. As years pass and war looms once again, a radical free spirit, the alcoholic nymphomaniac Marguerite (Pat Leehy) reappears in Trenbow's life after 10 years and re-establishes his confidence as he effects an eventual improvement in her emotional health. But neither Trenbow's backward slide, the new war nor the internment of the visiting Schneider can be stopped. And Trenbow, slumped in his easy chair, must watch his own son depart to fight a war he knows is ludicrous. Arthur Dignman as Trenbow's friend and colleague Avanti is oily, sharp anu i;i.iuh, Judy Morris as Deb is wise and humorous; and Gunter Meisner as Karl is stoic as the put-upon outsider. But it's Redg ra ve ' s i ncreas i n g I y-corru ga t ed puckish face you remember, along with the oddly-frozen family vignette that ends the film amid the hysteria of 1941. iSquizv Taylor Director Kevin Dobson's "Squiz-zy" "Squiz-zy" is an Australian "Sting" in flavor. Even the opening scene (a bumbled mugging in an alley and a chase) is reminiscent of the boyish criminality of the Redford Newman film. But David Atkins as the diminutive manipulator of the Melbourne underworld ecliDses his American counterparts in sauciness and vigor, Amid the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919 Squizzy begins his challenge of two-up (a kind of craps game, "the worker's pleasure") king Henry Stokes while rival detectives Brophy (Alan Cassell) and Piggott (Michael Long) take turns breathing down their necks and stepping on each other's official toes. In his rise from the obscurity of stolen overcoats and a live-in "moll," Squizzy utilizes his own press hound, Reg of the Herald a loyal if somewhat geeky friend to the end and goes head on against the unscrupulous (even for a baddie) Snowy Cutmore. Replacing the utilitarian Dolly (Jacki Weaver) is the classy Ida (Kim Lewis), who Squizzy courts in an impressive pas de deux only the young James Cagney could have rivaled in style. (The music of Bruce Smeaton is a perfect accompaniment to the gaudy dancehall-and-lowlife- bar tapestry of 1920s Melbourne. ) Only briefly and precariously perched at the top of the gangland heap. Squizzy ior as lie insists, his real name, Les) buys it in a hospital bed surrounded by fluttering nuns as "copybook policeman" Piggott interrogates in-terrogates him into the next world. Cocky even in death, Squizzy defies him. Atkins is supported by a cast and a screenplay that are more than good. 'Silver City The dazzle in this film comes from the luminous smile and blond allure of Gosia Dobrowiska as a Polish emigre to post-war Australia in love with a fellow displaced person (IvarKant). Told in flashback it's a believable forbidden-love story (the man is married and a father) with the usual semi-tragic consequences ruined friendship, damaged lives and lasting regret. But set amid the chaos and indignity of barracks life in an Australian "accommodation center" the couple's dilemma has an urgency that compels us to sympathize as much with them as with the abandoned wife (innocently suffering suffer-ing Anna Jemison reclaims her husband in the end). Best friend Steve Bisley is good natured and grinning, while his girl has the best gold-lame-and-tottering-heels wardrobe since "Some Came Running." The friendly Aussie neighbors are a raucous counterpoint to a sober situation and are more credible than the slightly-jerky lover Julian, of whom you sometimes wonder, "Is he worth it?" Polish-born director Sophia Turk-iewcz Turk-iewcz does a fine job evoking a little-known page of Australian Polish history, even though the lingering sense of wartime horrors, still a fresh wound to the immigrants, is never really felt. |
