Australian
Screen

The Goddess of 1967 is a beautiful, haunting, poetic film. It takes great risks with narrative style, in an attempt to find a new way to tell a story. That story is sometimes hidden, in order to subdue a sense of certainty. Perhaps more than in any of their previous films, Clara Law and her co-writer (and husband) Eddie LC Fong embrace ambiguity. If Floating Life (1996) was a film about the domestic strangeness of the Australian suburban surface for a family of new Hong Kong migrants, this film is about the bigger, emptier and darker heart of the continent.

Both films have a sense of awe and wonder about the huge skies and space of Australia, which is understandable from a filmmaker who grew up mostly in Hong Kong, but Goddess takes us beneath that sunny sky – literally, because the grandfather, played as an Irish migrant by Nicholas Hope, is an opal miner. He works underground and when BG finds him again at the end of the film, he’s actually living in his mine. A man who sexually abused his own daughter and granddaughter has gone mad. He eats rats, almost as if he is returning to a pre-human state of being. There is a subtle connection with the Japanese man, who is also disconnected from the world.

JM collects snakes and lizards, which live in heated glass enclosures in his Tokyo apartment. He acquires things, and the Citroën DS is his ultimate material craving – a car so beautiful that Roland Barthes, the famous semiotician, wrote, ‘It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky’. The film encourages us to feel the sensuous delight that the Japanese man feels in being around this car. Titles glide across the screen to fetishise its legendary status and Dion Beebe’s camera caresses its contours, as in a television commercial. These early scenes are unusual in a feature film, and disconcertingly light in tone, as in clip one where Rose Byrne’s character seems unfazed by living in a house where brain material is still stuck to the ceiling.

The look of the film is completely manipulated to avoid a sense of realism. The sky is heavily filtered to create dark bands of colour and each flashback has a different set of colour tones. The scenes of the car travelling are often done with rear projection, a technique which went out of style almost 50 years ago. All of these interruptions give us a sense of the blind girl’s reality – her ruptured experience of the world. They create an atmosphere in which the film becomes part dream, part poetic projection. The script is very directly a response to the wider Australian landscape – not the cities that we see in Floating Life (1996), but the darker, more threatening outback.

The idea grew out of a trip that Clara Law and Eddie LC Fong took soon after finishing Floating Life (1996). In an interview with filmmaker Kathryn Millard, on the Senses of Cinema website, Clara Law says, ‘We moved to Australia around 1994-5, and we wanted to know more about what it was like. And we had only really spent time in Sydney and Melbourne. So we took a four-wheel drive and went to the outback, and that was our first outback trip. We discovered a lot through just feeling the place, somehow having this direct dialogue with the landscape. For me it’s very important. Because I like to have that intuitive feeling for a place or what it is like and what it is kind of calling to me.’

This dialogue with the landscape is exactly what has animated filmmakers in Australia for the last 100 years or so – a question of finding a place, a fit, for the recently arrived migrants of the last 200 years. Clara Law joins the mainstream of Australian cinema in asking this question, but her answer doesn’t look like the response of most other Australian films to that landscape. It’s much more poetic and abstracted, although there may be a connection with the created landscape of Tracey Moffatt’s influential short film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1989). In the end, The Goddess of 1967 is a love story that’s made more powerful by its ambiguity and its lack of conventional storytelling.

The Goddess of 1967 was released in Australian cinemas on 25 April 2001.