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Winter of Our Dreams
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This intriguing, low-key drama charts the doomed relationship between an affluent, ex-radical intellectual (Bryan Brown as Rob) – why aren’t intellectuals in movies ever homeless wrecks? – and a Sydney King Cross junkie prostitute (Judy Davis as Lou). Writer-director John Duigan’s career had already been bubbling along in film, theatre and literature by the time he arrived at this project in the early 1980s. His subsequent trajectory would take other directions – genre pieces, such as the nutty thriller Paranoid (2000), or the celebrated, memoiristic duo of The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and Flirting (1991) – and depart to many different parts of the world, including USA, UK and Latin America. Already, however, we see in Winter of Our Dreams his penchant for a particular kind of (melo)drama: intimate, sexual life, awash in the supposed disillusionments fanned by a former, radical era (the kind of sad scenario Nanni Moretti detonates so well in Caro diario [1994)] … but juiced up by transgressions (of race, class, age and status) that make the unengaged, driftwood life worth living. Duigan’s talents are more novelistic than cinematic – in the sense that the characters are well-drawn, and their social interactions well-observed. As a film, however, the result lacks any necessary spark of intensity, lyricism or movement. It’s a common complaint (from me, certainly!) about many mainstream Australian directors, and it started in force, in this undoubted auteur’s case, with the doleful social realism of Mouth to Mouth (1978). Winter of Our Dreams was a modest success in its initial time and place; in retrospect, it’s among Duigan’s better-judged, more able efforts, several notches above howlers like One Night Stand (1984), Wide Sargasso Sea (1993), Sirens (1994) or Lawn Dogs (1998) – but not yet at the high-watermark level of the unjustly forgotten Head in the Clouds (2004). Today in his 70s, Duigan has seemingly retreated from public life (filmmaking included) in the wake of Thandiwe (formerly Thandie) Newton’s well-aired grievances about their past relationship. His career has yet to be reassessed – or even assessed for the first time! – as a whole. (Although I do note a recent academic book chapter devoted to the “Alternate [sic] Masculinities of John Duigan and Paul Cox”. Alternating between those two masculinities is a bit too much for me to seriously contemplate!) © Adrian Martin June 1990 / September 2024 |
