May 16

May 16 The Year of Living Dangerously

Every few years I feel the familiar tug — a wistful nostalgia for Southeast Asia. For incense burning and street noise, for equatorial downpours, the crowds and the strangely comforting otherness of it. The serene gentleness of the people, the unrelenting heat, the cacophony of sound and color, the matter-of-fact strangeness of it all. And so, every few years I let myself fall backwards and again, head over heels in love with… The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir 1982).

I remember very distinctly, in early 2016 — I was walking Blue on Lake Road on a drab, dun-colored winter day when I happened upon an old, favorite track on a mostly ignored playlist. I pressed ‘play’ and listened to L’Enfant by Vangelis, not once, but hitting replay 5 or 6 times, repeatedly, and for the next 30 minutes. I don’t even like Vangelis. But what is is about that piece of music that brings me right back to sweaty, exotic, mystical Asia? If you hit the link, and I hope you do, you’ll see some gorgeous textbook film transitions and hear that haunting piece of music. Synthesized, pulsating tones still resonating in my head, I immediately reached out to Leah. She was planning a trip home to Singapore in few months and I proposed an idea: how about I come out at the end of your time in Singapore and we travel on for a few weeks to Cambodia and Laos? This was met with an immediate and emphatic ‘yes’ and so that night, I rewatched The Year of Living Dangerously.

No fan of Mel Gibson IRL, (remember when I went took myself to see Hamilton for my birthday and gloated that I had a better seat than he did? No? Well I do) he is lovely in this film as Guy Hamilton, a fledging reporter covering Jakarta, Indonesia in the mid 1960s. He is great and Sigourney Weaver holds her own, but the stand out of course is Linda Hunt, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Billy Kwan, a man. Now that’s some real stunt casting…

Director Peter Weir, whose work you certainly know: Witness (1985), Dead Poet’s Society (1989) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) expertly conveys the squalor, the oppressive heat, the incessant noise and the political strife, the “emotion of the pressure cooker that was Indonesia in 1965” according to Variety. I love the film for the way he captures the romantic ‘fish out of water’ expatiness of it all. There is something so familiar, (and at times unflattering — the gin & tonic scene, the crass American who avails himself of desperate prostitutes and gloats about) in the way Weir showcases the hegemonic whiteness of the main characters against the coca brown back drop of Indonesia.

See it if you feel like being transported to another time and place, see it for its fine direction and performances. See it for its glimpse into Indonesia’s struggle for independence. Oh hell, I don’t care why you see it, just see it.