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The overture strikes a Ballardian note with a speeding car flipping over on the road, into the titular auto-wrecking yard it goes. An aerial shot surveys the sprawling stretch of mangled metal, the fleshy center is a married couple fraying at the edges, the former racing driver (Bruno Lawrence) and the French teacher (Anna Maria Monticelli). His obtuseness and her restlessness boil over, "when my old man's too busy greasing up back axles instead of making sure that I'm not up to no good, then I think I'm entitled to a bit of fun." Their row is overheard by their eight-year-old daughter (Greer Robson), who sits in a darkened room sucking her thumb and staring into a flashlight. The wife moves in with the local constable (Keith Aberdein), hubby's fuse is lit. "It's about time something criminal happened to shake up the whole affair," as the song goes. The material is concurrent with Shoot the Moon, though Roger Donaldson's handling of escalating tension is far closer to Straw Dogs. (A sprinkle of ominous slow-motion appears early in the magnified grain of a TV screen.) Masculine tunnel vision is a painted-over Grand Prix racer zipping down the barren highway, facing a locked door it angrily strips down to boots and socks. The spell behind bars gives way to a memory of a quickie during a funeral, the makeshift birthday for the kidnapped tyke includes bulbous candles on a squashed pastry. All the way to the splendidly unresolved finale, there's Lawrence's stolid-tender-volatile gaze, holed up in a garage and apologizing to the pharmacy employee he's holding hostage. "I think we should take it for a test drive. Don't you?" Donaldson stages a humorous echo or two in Cadillac Man a decade later. With Desmond Kelly, Sean Duffy, Lynne Robson, and Margaret Umbers.
--- Fernando F. Croce |