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| The Herald- melbourne 7th July 1977 |
The Easy Riders Lose Their Way |
FILM: "Backroads" (R) and "The War Game" (M) |
"Backroads" is, regrettably, an odyssey gone astray. |
Regret springs from reluctance to declare that a well-intentioned Australian film misses. It's doubly disappointing in this case, because "Backroads" begins so promisingly. As Russell Boyd's perceptive photography lovingly examines the outback landscape and the taut narrative peers into a neglected underside of rural life, hope arises that Phillip Noyce has made the definitive Australian road movie. |
But he runs off- or is it away from? the track. Noyce plunges through a paddock of racial polemic, replete with documentary style talking heads, and finally into sheer savage melodrama. |
The film begins with the anarchic appeal of an "Easy Rider". A loud –mouthed white dropout (Bill Hunter) and a resentfully-aware black (Gary Foley) steal a car in Bourke. They head for the coast, and a dream of "freedom", picking up another Aboriginal (Zac Martin), a French hitchhiker (Terry Camilleri) and a drifting divorcee (Julie McGregor). |
Inside the speeding car they are momentarily cocooned from the hostile world andits pressures. So far, so compelling although Noyce serves notice of harsh unrealites to come in the improbable ease with which the travellers con and rob their way east. Then the fictional narrative lurches abruptly into documentary monologue as Aboriginals talk bitterly about their lot. Significant stuff but much of the impact is diffused by the abrupt switch of technique. |
Back on the road, the principals argue the racial toss far more effectively. Then Noyce seems to tire of polemic choosing instead a symbolic finale of violence and death. A pity. For a while, these backboards really look as if they are leading to something important. From tonight, it shares a double bill with "The War Game", Peter Watkins's celebrated, but little seen, prediction about the effects of nuclear war. Made for TV in 1965, the film was banned by the BBC, but later won an Oscar. Told in Watkins's customary documentary style, it gains new relevance from the uranium debate. |
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