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Review in New Statesman | |
18th August 1978 | |
Phillip Noyce's widely touted Newsfront will be opening this year's London Film Festival, meanwhile we have his 60-minute debut, Backroads ('screenplay by John Emery, plus director and cast'), a forceful account of a roughneck, calamitous drive in a stolen car from the desert outback of New South Wales to the coast. After the pretentious ambiguities of Peter Weir's Last Wave, it is refreshing to find an aboriginal activist, Gary Foley, playing an utterly disillusioned native of the same forename in a context which emphasises the plight of blacks reduced to living in shanty towns or Reserves. | |
One bad day, a bearded white drop-out invites Gary to help him pinch a car. They filch clothes and booze at brief stop-overs, pick up Gary's alcoholic uncle Joe from a tin-shed Reserve, switch license plates and paint the car yellow. A French hitch-hiker and a sleazy girl from a gas station travel with them for a while, soon unabashedly screwing away in the back. Joe drinks and plays the guitar. The doomed idyll ferries over a strong sense of the unreeling, dusty landscape (camera:Russell Boyd). Much more, it lives in the uneasy exchanges between Gary and Jack, who at first trots out the unthinking white cliches about 'darkies' and 'wogs' but thaws and learns a bit as they hurtle on. There is some subtlety in Gary's presentation: he is resigned, after a fashion -'Let them think they have the upper hand', he tells the Frenchman- and has had a white wife. They reach the sea, the cops close in, the final shoot-out. It is a blunt, extreme work of informed pessimism...
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