Australian Notes

Saturday, 12th February 2011

There were several Julia Gillards in the rather chilly Four Corners portrait of the Prime Minister.

There were several Julia Gillards in the rather chilly Four Corners portrait of the Prime Minister. One is the driven, hard-nosed, aggressive leader. Another is the wooden public figure without empathy. A third is the pragmatic politician without convictions. She bridled most at being seen as a pragmatist. (‘Crazy.’) Yet this is the key to her success. It will see her through to the next election.

Hosni Mubarak now joins that long list of doomed US allies abandoned when they no longer serve America’s best interests. He joins the Shah of Iran, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and many more. But it is no criticism of the US that it puts its own interests first. It may sometimes misjudge them. (Look what happened to Iran after the Shah or South Vietnam after Diem.) Nor does it always give the highest priority to democracy. It supported the dictator Sukarno against Prime Minister Menzies when settling policy on Dutch New Guinea (and look what happened there). It supported the dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser against the Eden government in the Suez crisis (and ask Israel what happened next). The Australian government seems to think that President Obama knows what he is doing in Egypt. We must also hope, when considering our own national interest, that Australia does not excessively rely on the flexible goodwill of Uncle Sam.

How remarkable that it was left to an Australian director, Peter Weir, to make the first Hollywood film — and one of the few films made anywhere — about the Soviet Gulag and communism. It is The Way Back. I saw it the other day with Bruce Beresford, who has the DVD of the film all members of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with Oscar voting rights, are sent. Three other Australians helped make this brilliant film: the cinematographer Russell Boyd, the production designer John Stoddart and the composer Burkhard Dallwitz. The story is based on Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk about six men and a woman who escaped from the Gulag in 1941 and began their walk of 4,000 miles over three years from Siberia to India and freedom. Four men survived. One told his story to Rawicz. It is essentially a true story. The way back of the title is the way back from communist dehumanisation to normalcy, freedom and love. It inspired Weir. But the only Oscar nomination this wonderful film received was by the make-up team for its success in conveying the ravages of snow, heat, dust, disease, scurvy, hypothermia and dehydration on the faces of the fugitives. There was no nomination for Weir, Boyd, Stoddart or Dallwitz or any of the cast, which includes Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronan. Nor were there any nominations at the Baftas, the Golden Globes, the Critics Awards or whatever. (It has been a strikingly competitive year for films, thanks to The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Black Swan and others.) The story begins in 1940 in Soviet-occupied Poland. A communist legal apparatchik accuses a Polish officer of spying, sabotage and criticism of Stalin. The wife of the officer has been tortured into ‘confirming’ the allegations. The Polish officer knows she has been tortured. The Soviet apparatchik knows. Everybody knows. When the Pole refuses to sign a confession, he is sentenced to 20 years in the Gulag. The story then moves to Siberia and the well-researched scenes of life in the Gulag logging camps — the starvation, the scavenging for garbage, the murderous fights. New characters are introduced: an American former communist (Ed Harris), a Latvian priest, a criminal. During a deadly storm, six prisoners escape. Later a Polish woman on the run joins them. The fugitives tramp thousands of miles across arctic tundra and waterless deserts, sustained by the determination never to return to the Soviet Union — and in the hero’s case his determination to release his wife from her burden of guilt. Ultimately they reach India and the free world. (A wonderful Indian bureaucrat asks them for their passports! ‘Never mind,’ he adds cheerfully. ‘Come with me.’) But this is no happy ending. There can be no happy ending for these men while the curse of communism remains over their families. After several decades communism finally collapses. In a deeply moving concluding scene the Polish officer and his wife, the old man and the old woman, at last meet and embrace. The political and personal themes of The Way Back are extremely simple. Peter Weir put in well in an interview in the New York Times: ‘As a filmmaker you spend all your life working on simplification. That’s what you aim for if you are lucky enough to have a long career.’ The Way Back will be released in Australia shortly. Don’t miss it.

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