Customer Reviews

Far East [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.4 Import - Australia ]

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Australian writer director John Duigan's drama is a retread of Casablanca, with Bryan Brown playing stoic Bogie and Helen Morse as his emotional Ingrid Bergman. The former lovers reunited gets an added local spin since Brown and Morse starred together in the TVM of A Town Like Alice, and it's their familiarity which accounts for their screen chemistry. However the political intrigue that passes for WW2 here is the Phillipines where Morse's husband John Bell is a crusading journalist out to expose multinational exploitation. Brown himself owns the Koala Klub, an oasis for Australians, which features local girls dancing to some of the worst dance music imaginable, and the way Duigan's camera lingers on the girls and the men learing at them, suggests that Brown is also an exploiter. Brown gets a chance to do something apart from serve drinks and be a larrikan when Bell is arrested and Morse asks for his help. That the rescue mission is ludicrous is not a surprise after we get Brown in a bar brawl to show how tough he is, his Phillipino girlfriend hysterically expressing her jealousy of Morse, the military presented the way the Japanese are in American WW2 propaganda, and a cliched slo mo finale, though there is an effective rape scene viewed from an expressionist angle. Brown isn't the kind of actor to let us in on his private feelings for Morse. Even given that her alternative is the somewhat dull Bell who actually shows more romantic interest in the Phillipino activist he befriends, we can guess who she will pick to go with at the end. She has fun with her French accent, is funny when she is angry, and wears a fabulous ostrich style dress at a party.

I was hoping it would be a bit more like Morse and Brown's previous movie " A Town Like Alice " which was on par with " For Whom The Bell Tolls "... But it fell way short. But Helen Morse and Bryan Brown made it worth watching anyway.