Überleben in Malaysia

The summary says it all. Trivia

1) The writer is Blanche D'Alpuget who married Bob Hawke,the ex-Prime Minister of Australia

2) The Viets were labeled as refugees in the West but "illegal economic migrants" in Asia.

3) The Malaysian Govt "excised" Pulau Bidong & other islands from Malaysian legal jurisdiction and dumped the Viets there without recourse to Malaysian law. The western world, particularly Australia, & U.S roundly criticised Malaysia for being heartless and refusing to allow the Viets to settle in Malaysia.

4) Years later, the U.S did the same thing when faced with waves of Haitian "refugees" landing on Miami beaches. These Haitian were now termed as "illegal aliens" and were dumped in Gitmo before being forcibly deported back to Haiti. Then the Australian Govt did the same when faced with Iraqi "refugees" (Tampa incident) The Aussies dumped these newly termed "illegal immigrants" on the island of Nauru !!!

Hypocrisy? You bet !!! It's always different when it happens on your doorstep isn't it ???

After the fall of Saigon to the Communists in 1975, a large number of Vietnamese opposed to the Communist regime fled the country, many of them finding refuge in America or other Western countries. At the end of the seventies and into the eighties, following the worsening of relations between Vietnam and its former allies in China, there was a second wave of refugees from Vietnam as the regime turned on the country's Chinese minority. Many of these new refugees attempted to reach other South-East Asian countries by boat and hence became known as the "boat people".

This film, based on a novel by Blanche d'Alpuget, the wife of a former Australian Prime Minister, tells the story of Judith, an Australian photojournalist determined to bring to the world's attention the plight of boat people being held in terrible conditions in a refugee camp sited on an offshore Malaysian island. The Malaysian Government, of course, does not want her to find out the truth, and she receives little support either from her own government or from her bosses, who do not want to upset the authorities, but she is helped by Minou, the Vietnamese wife of an Australian diplomat.

For obvious reasons filming could not take place in Malaysia. The Malaysian Government took deep exception to the storyline, especially the scenes in which a Malay mob murder a large number of refugees, despite (or more likely because of) the fact that these scenes are historically accurate and that their own treatment of the boat people was marked by a complete lack of humanity. Hussein Onn, Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time, notoriously said that if any more boat people come to Malaysia "we will shoot them". (When this remark caused international outrage he claimed, unconvincingly, that what he had really said was "we will shoo them"). This uncompassionate attitude was rooted in Malaysia's own complex racial politics and its long and unlovely history of bigotry and racial discrimination against its own Chinese minority. (The film opens with a recreation of the riots of May 1969, in which many ethnic Chinese were slaughtered by Malay mobs).

There are a number of similarities between "Turtle Beach" and Peter Weir's "The Year of Living Dangerously", another Australian film about a journalist who gets involved in political turmoil in a South-East Asian country (in that case Indonesia). Much as I admire Weir, one of the greatest living directors, I have never regarded "The Year of Living Dangerously" as being his best film. Even so, it is a lot better than "Turtle Beach", a film so unsuccessful that it was nicknamed "Turkey Beach" by derisive critics. Both the director Stephen Wallace and the scriptwriter Ann Turner blamed its failure upon interference by the producers, who allegedly had no clear idea of what sort of film they wanted to make. According to Wallace, 'the producers all wanted to make "Pretty Woman" '.

If that was indeed their goal, they can hardly be said to have succeeded- "Turtle Beach" bears virtually no resemblance to that amiable rom-com "Pretty Woman" whatsoever. Indeed, it bears very little resemblance to anything apart from a complete mess. Turner said that "When I first saw the film I thought it looked like the writer was on drugs or completely insane". She was certainly right about that. We cannot know what the film would have been like had her original script been kept, but the script that was actually used is often confusing and difficult to follow, with an ending makes very little sense at all. The film stars Greta Scacchi and Joan Chen, two leading international stars of the period, as Judith and Minou, but both seem completely wasted here, as does the well-known Australian actor Jack Thompson as Judith's boss Ralph. The tragedy of the Vietnamese boat people deserved a much better film than this. 4/10

I'll stand up for it. It's true that the film can be picked apart and left for dead. Chen is not an actress and this is widely known. The story twists are not exactly predictable, yet they have little impact. The "moral" at the end is cheesy.

If you know something about the film business you can read between the lines. Movies like this don't get made much. Greta Scacchi and Joan Chen almost certainly signed on because they believed in the politics and the social mission. Scacchi at least was at a pivotal moment in her career. Hollywood had taken notice and she had some real power. She could have made any movie and she chose this one. When she and Chen attached, the film got financed -- as long as she and Chen agreed to appear nude. The director was probably stuck with Chen and with no other way to get his film made, that's the way it goes in the movie biz.

The budget was probably tight and the shoot was a hassle -- lots of water scenes. Lots of extras to manage. Language barriers. They probably had to shoot fast to avoid running out of money. The editing feels chopped up -- it should be 10-15 minutes longer for real character development. I got the feeling that the cut was taken away from the director and edited for easier sale.

On the positive side: Turtle Bay's heart is in the right place. It tells a story of Malaysia that I haven't seen and did not know about. The film makes subversive statements about the Australian diplomatic corps. Sure, we've seen it before and much better, but it's not total propaganda as a previous reviewer implied. No one gets away with it on this one.

For this viewer the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This movie was a pleasure. I love watching Scacchi and it's great to see her play in her native accent. Worth it for that alone.

In a nutshell: Greta Scacchi uses the heart-wrenching plight of the Vietnamese boat people to get a fabulous tan.

OK, that's an exaggeration, but the film suffers from a lack of heft. Its intentions are good, and its heart is in the right place, but....

Very much in the same manner as a porn film, which would only muster the most minimal plotline to move the film from sex scene to sex scene, this is almost a documentary with the minimal plot necessary to justify making a movie about the subject. The performers are lightweights, as well, many of them (notably Joan Chen) just barely able to deliver a line with credible inflections. The acting is so stilted and superficial, watching this movie is like listening to a Van Damme impersonating contest on Saturday Night Live.

Sadly, it's not bright enough to be an art film, and not slick enough to be a popular entertainment. I don't know who they thought their audience might be.

Despite possessing such rich emotional material, the filmmakers failed to strike the powerful chord which should have been inherent in the situation.

Following the fall of Saigon (1975), boat people arrived by the thousands on the shores of, among other places, Turtle Beach in Malaysia. "Turtle Beach" attempts to tell that story while weaving in side plots having to do with a Vietnamese woman (Chen) who married money and throws it at the problem while trying to reunite with her children and an Aussie reporter (Sacchi) who wants to do a story about the boat people which the Malaysian government wants to suppress. The film plays out mechanically with two dimensional characters and clumsy attempts to spice it up with a dash of romance and sex. A mediocre (docu)drama only for the hard up couch potato.

Note - The Malay Vietnamese boat people colonized Bidong Island not far from Tioman Island (until 1991), filming location for "South Pacific". "Turtle Beach" was not filmed in Malaysia.