Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/30/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)

Alison Routledge, Bruno Lawrence, and Pete Smith in The Quiet Earth

Cast: Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Pete Smith, Anzac Wallace, Norman Fletcher, Tom Hyde. Screenplay: Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury, based on a novel by Craig Harrison. Cinematography: James Bartle. Production design: Josephine Ford. Film editing: Michael Horton. Music: John Charles.

One day a scientist, Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence), wakes up to discover that he's the last person on Earth. Apparently every living human being has vanished. Absolute freedom and solitude make Zac go a little nuts until he encounters two other survivors, and they set out to explore the world they've been left. Comparing stories, they realize that at the moment when everything else disappeared, they were dying: Suicidal about his work, Zac had taken an overdose of sleeping pills; Joanne (Alison Routledge) was being electrocuted by a faulty hair dryer; and Api (Pete Smith) was being killed in a fight. They deduce that because they were half-dead, the disappearance effect didn't take hold on them. Eventually, Zac discovers that a repeat of the effect is about to occur, which would obliterate him and his companions. He manages to forestall it, but although Joanne and Api survive, he winds up in a setting that seems to be on another planet. And there the movie has its enigmatic ending. Although The Quiet Earth does a great job of depicting Zac's breakdown when he discovers he is alone, and how he and his fellow survivors cope with the situation when they discover one another, it doesn't add up to a satisfactory movie. It fails to avoid the Questions You're Not Supposed To Ask. Like, why did people's clothes vanish with them? (Zac finds the wreckage of an airplane, but the seat belts are fastened over nothing. The passengers were presumably not naked.) The premise of mysterious mass disappearances was done better in the HBO series The Leftovers. which was inspired by the Christian eschatological belief in the Rapture, but without the theological underpinnings. There is a feint at a scientific explanation in The Quiet Earth, having to do with a global energy project, but it feels like just a plot device to set up a fable about technological overreach or something. Its aims are muddled and it feels flimsy.