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Clip description
British embassy staffer Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) tells her new lover Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) that a Chinese ship is en route with arms for the Indonesian Communists. She wants him to leave before the country explodes in violence but Hamilton wants to stay, and use her information to confirm a major story. When Billy (Linda Hunt) learns about his betrayal of trust, he is disgusted. Hamilton sets out to confirm the story independently, in order to hide what everyone will guess – that she gave him the information.
Curator’s notes
The film is partly about detachment, or perhaps disengagement. Hamilton is an observer, Kwan is a participant. Hamilton observes events, Kwan makes things happen – like the relationship between Guy and Jill. Kwan collects characters, like a puppet-master (note the wayang puppet drawings in his file on Hamilton); Guy collects facts, intelligence, without allowing himself to care. Jill betrays her employer to try to save his life, but he barely recognises her gesture. Indeed, he’s prepared to risk damaging her, or as Billy sees it, betraying her, for the sake of the story.
Guy Hamilton’s detachment from what is happening around him is perhaps a metaphor for the detachment of Western countries in general. Billy Kwan gets deeply involved with a woman in a slum, after her child dies. In the end he sacrifices himself for the sake of a protest against the Indonesian president, ‘Bung’ Sukarno. Hamilton barely comprehends the place he’s in, nor the people. He doesn’t feel it as Billy feels it. He can’t give enough of himself, either in work or in his personal relationships, according to Kwan’s analysis, tapped out on the typewriter.
The book was written in the context of a wider debate – taking in Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ‘70s – about Australia’s engagement with Asia and the rest of the world. Christopher Koch worked as a radio journalist with the ABC from 1962 to ’72, when he became a full-time writer. The novel was published in 1978, when relations between Australia and Indonesia were still very much strained by the Indonesian takeover of East Timor in October 1975.
