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2008 Toronto Film Festival Blog Now Live! Newest Reviews: New Movies - The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World Old Movies - Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007
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The Year of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir) 1983
Eventual ho-hum isolationism
aside, there’s plenty to like here. Certainly the film is adept at evoking the
feel of a poverty stricken nation, and it’s to Weir’s credit that he rarely
stoops to easy sentimentalism. The scenes that follow our foreign correspondents
as they smash through roadblocks and plunge into the rioting masses are
sufficiently rebellious and exciting to make the title feel apt, even if the
only supposedly interesting love story that’s there as a subplot seems to do
the opposite. One can’t exactly blame the actors, who are pretty enough, for
the lack of real sparks though, because the script doesn’t develop them into
people with satisfying motivating concerns (mostly they seem horny). Weir’s
direction of them isn’t really at fault, either. He pulls the good stuff from
his actors without ever amping things up too wildly. If the film lacks the
poetic attention to and transcendence from the physical world that Weir’s best
work contains, that’s okay too, because the mood here is more about experience
than reflection. Complexities are apparently as rare in Indonesia as they are in
most of Hollywood. Nonetheless, The Year
of Living Dangerously is a rousing and sharp look at a land that’s far
from our own in more ways than one. * * * 01-09-02 Jeremy Heilman
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