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The Sound of One Hand Clapping
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What went
wrong with this film?
Perhaps,
fundamentally, it was the attempt to turn novelist Richard Flanagan (Death of a River Guide) into an instant
auteur, with only a little on-the-job training and a watchful producer (Rolf De
Heer) by his side. But a literary vision – however majestic and poetic on the
page – does not instantly translate into a grasp of cinematic art or craft. On
screen, The Sound of One Hand Clapping becomes one huge, unbearable, omnivorous black hole. (It seems mercifully
unlikely that Flanagan, since returned to literature, will try his hand at
cinema again.)
On one
level, this joins a contemporaneous crop of films (such as Under the Skin [1997] and Stella Does Tricks [1996]) about women in desperate
search of their identity. For Sonja (Kerry Fox), this involves a journey back
to her homeland of
Tasmania,
and a coming to terms with the present and past reality of her stern, drunken
father (Kristof Kaczmarek). Particularly unsettling to Sonja is the enigmatic
disappearance, long ago, of her mother (Melita Jurisic).
Flanagan
has professed a love for Eastern European cinema, and the ghost of Kieslowksi
looms large over this gloomy venture. The film grinds to an agonising crawl
within its first few minutes – marked at every point by poor direction of the
actors, a leaden flashback structure, and hopelessly overstated symbolism.
Cezary Skubiszewski's overwrought music attempts to provide the emotion and
energy lacking in the visuals.
Flanagan's
opus exhibits a truly maudlin obsession with life's victims. Everyone suffers, everyone is an emotional cripple – felled by
history, wounded by family relations, shunned by society. It is a typical case
of 20th century blues, thinly and unconvincingly presented: the migrants whose
lives were traumatised by the horrors of their old world and then emptied by
the unfriendliness of their new world; and their dreary Australian children,
adrift in a cultural wasteland, without morality or spirituality.
There is
not one decent laugh or moment of true warmth in this movie. Every character is
a zombie, in a state of permanent exile, shuffling slowly about with the
baggage of their unspoken despair and their painfully maintained solitude.
There is no sense of community rituals, no uplifting or pleasant memories –
only oblivion. That is, until the arrival of an absurd sequence of revelations,
cathartic tears and personal awakenings – cued by (here's a surprise) Sonja's
pregnancy.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping comes with an unfortunate but
completely accurate promotional tag – a bold declaration that it covers
"the only three stories that have ever mattered: birth, death and
love!" With a pretentious ambition like that – and a portentous manner to
match it – this movie deserves the description that Pauline Kael once unfairly
laid on Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978): "The film is an empty Christmas tree; you can hang all your dumb
metaphors on it".
MORE Australian immigration melodrama: Silver City © Adrian Martin April 1998 |
