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Poe provides the first of numerous allusions, the main note is from Roeg's Walkabout. The boarding school for girls ca. 1900 is a small imperial patch in the middle of the Australian bush, the outing on Saint Valentine's Day is a proper treat for the lasses. ("Tomboy foolishness" is verboten.) La danse des nymphes, among them "a Botticelli angel" (Anne-Louise Lambert) oddly attuned to the ethereal-sinister surroundings, daintily leading a few classmates up the ancient volcanic formation. Gloves are allowed to be removed, the girls go further and doff their shoes and stockings before disappearing in the heights. "Everything begins and ends at the exactly right place and time." An elegantly attenuated experiment by Peter Weir—mood and ambiguity giving way to more mood and ambiguity, a swirl of diffuse intoxication with a void reserved for interpretations. Erotic awakening, colonial anxiety, Gothic mysticism, take your pick. The orphaned roommate (Margaret Nelson) reveres the vanished colleague like a flower pressed between book pages, the young British aristocrat (Dominic Guard) adduces a soupçon of Ovid with a vision of swans. (She expires in the greenhouse, he's pointedly still the boy from The Go-Between.) Contemplating the unraveling of controlled terrain, the Victorian headmistress (Rachel Roberts) drifts toward madness, a single strand of hair dangling messily from her redoubtable beehive. Zamfir flutes and baleful rumblings, slow motion and dissolves, the working-class valet (John Jarratt) has a term for it all, "sort of misty-like." The ripped lace in the clenched fist, the missing corset. "There's some questions got answers and some haven't." The Hitchcock material (The Birds) reappears in The Last Wave, Polanski's Tess is a refinement of the technique. Cinematography by Russell Boyd. With Helen Morse, Wynn Roberts, Karen Robson, Christine Schuler, Jane Vallis, Vivean Gray, Kristy Child, and Jacki Weaver.
--- Fernando F. Croce |