The Plumber (1979)

          Seeing as how Australian director Peter Weir has long been ranked among the best living filmmakers, even the seemingly trivial projects from his early days are of interest, if only to study how he developed his craftsmanship. Originally made for Australian television and running a scant 76 minutes, The Plumber is especially noteworthy in this regard because it represents a transitional stage between Weir’s initial theatrical features (which tended toward eerie surrealism) and his breakthrough films (which were straight-ahead narratives with lyrical touches). The Plumber is a seemingly simplistic thriller about a housewife being menaced by a strange contractor, but the deceptive façade hides layers of meaning and symbolism. None will mistake The Plumber for a lost classic of the thriller genre, but it’s an expertly made piece that demonstrates how much texture a gifted storyteller can derive from minimal elements.

          Set in a graduate-student housing complex, the movie focuses on anthropology student Jill Cowper (Judy Morris), who spends most of her days in a small apartment while her husband, medical researcher Brian Cowper (Robert Coleby), works in a lab. One day, a burly bloke named Max (Ivar Kants) shows up unannounced and claims he’s got a work order to check the plumbing in the apartment’s bathroom. Thus begins a strange odyssey during which Max shows up, day after day, to bedevil Jill by making inordinate amounts of noise, poking through her personal items, and revealing frightening facts about himself—at one point, for instance, Max “jokes” that he was once imprisoned for rape. The clever spin that writer-director Weir puts on the material is a level of ambiguity related to Max’s true nature. Is he evil or merely obnoxious? And is Jill justifiably nervous or just high-strung?

          Resisting every opportunity to elevate The Plumber into a full-on horror show, Weir focuses exclusively on the tensions of interpersonal relationships, as well as the problems that arise from otherness. Despite all of her insights into primitive cultures, for instance, Jill seems completely flummoxed about how to handle a working-class bruiser. Many viewers will find The Plumber underwhelming or even dull, since it never quite goes to the place that one expects (read: outright violence). Nonetheless, the complexity and naturalism of the performances is impressive. Further, Weir and his crew find an incredible number of angles for shooting the main location of the apartment, so even though the film feels claustrophobic (which suits the story), it never feels visually repetitive.

The Plumber: GROOVY

The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)

          First, the usual disclaimer for a foreign film that received a dodgy initial release in the U.S.—this Australian feature was originally titled The Cars That Ate Paris, but the fine folks at New Line Cinema must have assumed that American moviegoers would wrongly assume the picture was set in France. Hence the moniker on the above poster: The Cars That Eat People. And while automobiles don’t actually consume any people (or municipalities) in the picture, onscreen events are so bizarre that carnivorous vehicles wouldn’t have represented much of a stretch. Incredibly, this grim phantasmagoria represents the directorial debut of Peter Weir, who subsequently joined the ranks of the world’s most respected filmmakers. One assumes that the normally high-minded Weir envisioned the picture as a satire on consumerist culture (and on the eccentricities of rural Australians), but the surpassing weirdness of The Cars That Ate Paris is highly distracting. The picture doesn’t cross over into outright surrealism, but it comes close.

          Framed somewhat like a horror movie, The Cars That Ate Paris presents a fictional Australian municipality called Paris, where the main business is scavenging parts from cars that crash on a nasty mountaintop road just outside of town. In fact, Paris residents actually cause these accidents, evading notice from authorities by concealing evidence. Worse, survivors are taken to the local hospital and lobotomized, which is why the hospital is stocked with people in semi-vegetative states. One night, a sad-sack type named Arthur (Terry Camilleri) and his brother fall into the Paris trap, and only Arthur survives. For reasons that never become particularly clear, the mayor of Paris, Les (John Meillon), decides to accept Arthur into the town’s regular population. Conveniently for the plot, Arthur is afraid of driving because he once caused a fatal vehicular accident, so he has no real means of escape. Much of The Cars That Ate Paris depicts Arthur’s integration into the strange rhythms of Paris culture. The movie also dramatizes strife between the town’s established power structure and youthful rebels led by Charlie (Bruce Spence). The whole strange predicament concludes with a citywide celebration that turns into a bloody riot. During the climax, Weir unleashes such peculiar vignettes as the mayor reading an intense poem filled with Aussie patois (never has the word “billabong” found a more suitable home). Meanwhile, the youth gang rages through the town in customized cars festooned with spikes and other lethal adornments.

          By far the least effective element of The Cars That Ate Paris is the picture’s esoteric humor. Some of the visual gags are so broad they could appear in Monty Python sketches (such as the town doctor using a power drill to perform lobotomies), and some of the bits are so subtle as to barely exist. It’s also possible that the film is so infused with Aussie signifiers that foreigners don’t possess the necessary frame of reference for recognizing some of the punch lines. Still, as the movie grinds through one inexplicable scene after another (and as indifferent leading man Camilleri shuffles through the movie like he’s received one of the town’s signature lobotomies), a sense of inertia clouds the whole enterprise. It’s evident that Weir had an absurdist itch to scratch at this point his career; after all, his next two films were 1975’s ethereal Picnic at Hanging Rock and 1977’s impenetrable The Last Wave. Furthermore, given all that Weir has subsequently accomplished, it’s unwise to dismiss The Cars That Ate Paris as simply a misguided or pretentious attempt at allegory. However, evidence contravening that assessment remains in short supply, because The Cars That Ate Paris is as dull as it is odd.

The Cars That Ate Paris: FREAKY

The Last Wave (1977)

          Australian filmmaker Peter Weir made this enigmatic movie as the follow-up to his first international success, the moody drama Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and The Last Wave ventures even further into the realm of dark fantasy than its predecessor. Filled with dream sequences, jarring sound effects, perplexed characters, and unexplained phenomena, The Last Wave rides the same trippy groove as many of David Lynch’s movies. It’s telling that Weir shifted into more conventional storytelling after making The Last Wave, generating such intense dramas as The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and Witness (1985); although those pictures integrate atmosphere just as strongly as the director’s early oddities, Weir clearly found his niche as dramatist, rather than as a fantasist.

          Anyway, The Last Wave features a most unlikely leading man, tightly wound TV heartthrob Richard Chamberlain, as a Australian lawyer drawn into an odd criminal case at the same time the island nation is plagued by strange weather. And since the hero defends four Aboriginals, the storyline includes a heady dose of mysticism and premonition, as seen through the prism of the ongoing culture clash that’s inherent to the texture of post-Colonial Australia. Oh, and all of this is squished into the cinematic framework of a thriller—sort of—because The Last Wave exists somewhere on the loose continuum between drama and horror. When the story begins, several Aboriginals get into a brawl at a pub, ending in a death. David (Chamberlain), a tax lawyer who doesn’t normally handle criminal matters, is enlisted to represent the surviving Aboriginals, and this triggers a strange spiral in David’s orderly existence. In the course of investigating the crime—and attempting to understand the weird meteorological happenings plaguing Australia—David transitions from the comforting world of rational explanations to the frightening zone of metaphysical mysteries.

          Weir, who co-wrote the picture with Tony Morphett and Petru Popsecu, paints himself into one narrative corner after another—and whether he actually extricates himself from these traps is a highly subjective matter. Clearly averse to providing tidy explanations, Weir generates a series of cryptic signifiers, often presenting long stretches of screen time without dialogue. Very soon into the movie’s running time, it becomes challenging to differentiate what’s “really” happening from what’s occurring inside the protagonist’s mind. Therefore, by the end of the movie, it’s tough to determine whether the narrative has reached a personal apocalypse or an actual apocalypse.

          One wonders whether all of this would have been more effective with a defter actor in the leading role, because while Chamberlain valiantly simulates existential panic and general intensity, he fails to define David as a distinctive character. Conversely, Aboriginal actor David Gulpill (of Walkabout fame) brings an effective level of mystery to his performance as one of the accused men, since his character represents a native culture that white men like David will never fully understand. The Last Wave is an interesting ride, but the movie demands great patience on the part of the viewer. Growing steadily more opaque with each passing scene, the film dives deep into dark water and never looks back.

The Last Wave: FREAKY

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

          Although Australian director Peter Weir had been working steadily on feature and TV projects in his homeland since the late ’60s, he first scored worldwide acclaim with this evocative literary adaptation, which is often mistaken for a depiction of a real historical incident. Novelist Joan Lindsay, who wrote the book upon which the film is based, has given so many cryptic answers about the inspiration for his story that some interested parties have tried to prove that three girls from a private college (and one of their adult caretakers) really disappeared in 1900 while exploring Hanging Rock, a massive geological formation in South Australia. As written by Cliff Green, this film adaptation fuels the speculative fire by presenting Lindsay’s narrative like a true-life unsolved mystery. Moreover, Weir casts a beguiling spell by exploring the multilayered psychological impact of the disappearances on people throughout the area containing both the college and Hanging Rock. (The geological formation, at least, is real.)

          The film reveals characterization through crisis. Stern headmistress Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) frays when the careful order of her school dissipates; fragile orphan Sara (Margaret Nelson) crumbles after the loss of a fellow student with whom she was infatuated; and a wealthy young man, Tom (Tony Llewellyn-Jones), becomes obsessed with finding the missing girls. Lingering over all of these characters is the specter of Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), the leader of the group that went missing. An ethereal beauty, she represents a life force whose loss the world cannot abide. This is all very heady stuff, and Picnic at Hanging Rock is perhaps most successful as a conversation piece, since it raises all sorts of provocative questions about what happens when the lives we build for ourselves get shaken by unforeseeable events.
          Furthermore, Weir’s filmmaking is unassailably tasteful, with eerie pan-flute melodies floating over gossamer images of beautiful girls in white-linen dresses wandering through the volcanic outcroppings of Hanging Rock. Yet after the memorable first half-hour, which depicts the prelude to the disappearances and the actual Hanging Rock excursion, the narrative becomes muddy and turgid. Weir and his collaborators seem indecisive about which characters should be most prominent, and Weir vacillates between flights of dreamlike fancy and hard-edged vignettes of character-driven realism. The movie is also painfully humorless, so the middle stretch is quite tedious. Things cohere bit more during the finale, when viewers are finally shown the lasting impact of the disappearances, although it’s frustrating that certain climactic events are dismissed in a closing voiceover instead of being depicted onscreen. All in all, Picnic at Hanging Rock is filled with interesting insights, moments, and textures, but its restraint is stifling.
          Still, the picture helped Weir get noticed as a filmmaker of unusual sensitivity, so just a few years later, he directed his first Hollywood movie, the similarly moody The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Six Oscar nominations later (so far), Weir is firmly entrenched as one of the world’s most respected cinematic storytellers.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: FUNKY