In a Savage Land

If you're looking for something a little different and with an unusual setting and story, I'd definitely recommend this. Although filmed under challenging circumstances in a remote part of the world, it is a superb production with great acting performances all round, good direction, visually stunning camera work. Perhaps not one for the average guy, but any gals who like period pieces should really enjoy it.

I do regret that for the last few years I haven't lived in Melbourne. Then I might have got to meet the beautiful and talented Maya Stange. She's been treading the boards in the former JeffLand and it would have been a treat to have seen her at work on the stage.

She stars in In A Savage Land. Stange hails from Western Australia and this is her first lead role in a feature film.. But enough of that.

This unfortunate film was made by Australia's Bill Bennet (Kiss or Kill, Spider and Rose, Two If By Sea.)

Bill Bennet had an excellent leading lady in Maya Stange and an equally effective leading man in the fairly ubiquitous Englishman Rufus Sewell, but is hampered by an under worked script for which Bennet and his wife Jennifer, rather ill advisedly also take credit.

In A Savage Land tells the story of a pair of anthropologists (Maya Stange and Martin Donovan) who travel to the Trobriand islands near the then New Guinea. They're fascinated by the reported avid and animated sexual habits the natives are reported to exhibit.

Now this should start ringing alarm bells for mature cinema goers. The topic smacks of immaturity and shallowness, not necessarily, but we've seen cheap, easy sex, or the promise of it, ruin plenty of films before, most recently Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Should Have Been Shut.

Anyway off they go from England to check out the mating habits of the natives, having got married to get the job, establishing along the way some conflict between husband and wife regarding the position of an uppity, bright, modern woman who dares to have her own opinions.

Once they get to the tropics there's some business regarding who's supposed to be having sex with who in the village. Someone becomes offended and a native commits suicide. The white wife goes native and takes up with the local white trader (Rufus Sewell).

A cliched Australian colonial administrator (Max Cullen) and a similarly pat local evangelist (John Howard) make their pompous entries and exits and we find out almost nothing about the natives, or even the anthropologists even when the situation gets muddy and dangerous, and in spite of some spectacular scenery.

The film was reportedly filmed in Niu Guinea under trying circumstances but there seem to be at least a dozen fades to a black screen, a sure sign of a poorly organised effort. This film that could well have been called In A Slight Script.

It's difficult to become involved in a story with as many loose plot ends as this one, even one that stars the very promising Maya Stange.

Real Anthropology is of course an impossibility - how can a human study human society objectively? Earlier this century Western scholars were under the comfortable delusion they could apply the eye of God technique (so useful for writing novels) to the study of indigenous peoples in various parts of the earth. The eye of God sees all, but the anthropologist, constrained by his or her own conditioning, saw only a partial picture, or else got it wrong entirely. Thus Margaret Mead saw free love in Samoa, where in reality there was a complicated series of taboos.

This visually gorgeous film, made with great difficulty on location in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea, is the kind of picture you would get if National Geographic did joint ventures with Mills and Boon. Spunky young anthropology graduate (Maya Stange) marries her handsome if rather remote Professor (Martin Donovan) and they go off to the fabled Trobriand Islands to do a year's fieldwork in the steps of the great Malinowski who described them as the Isles of Love. The Prof has the rather strange idea that he can study a matrilinear society (where kinship is determined by female descent) by talking exclusively to the men. Naturally Spunky has other ideas and soon starts to make waves. Conveniently located nearby is devastatingly handsome Trader Dick (Rufus Sewell) who soon starts displaying an interest in Spunky. Naturally things get a bit tense. Just as the plot gets a bit tedious, Force Majeure in the form of World War Two intervenes. Will Spunky find her lost love? The answer depends on which version of the film you see.

The two anthropologists, neatly outfitted in tropical linen, make bulls in china shops look like brain surgeons. The Prof is supposed to be experienced, yet he plunks himself down in the middle of the village, completely ignoring the fact that not only can he see all through the village, the inhabitants can see him 24 hours a day also. He, or the script writers, had only to read Malinowski's diaries to appreciate the difficulties of this kind of fieldwork. Spunky on the other hand intervenes every time she comes across a local custom she doesn't like, though to her credit after causing a tragedy she comes to see the folly of her ways. Then she overreacts by going native for a while.

The real problem with the film though is that, like Spunky and the Prof, we stay outside the native society, we do not feel with them, but observe them from a distance. The anthropologists, two implausible characters in a half-formed plot, simply do not get inside their subject. The redneck traders understand the natives better even as they exploit them. As one of the traders says, "these are the nicest people in the world and you can't believe a thing they say." That does help to explain how Margaret Mead got it so spectacularly wrong in Samoa.

All that said, Maya Stange as Spunky holds the viewer's attention and Rufus Sewell does a nice understated Trader Dick with a somewhat indeterminate accent - Dick is mean to be American.. Max Cullen turns in a convincing portrait of a weary (and regrettably authentically racist) Australian colonial servant. The photography is as luscious as one could wish. Maybe the producers should have just made a documentary and left Messrs Mills and Boon on the shelf.

Bill Bennet's really come of age as a film maker with this masterful epic. Top notch performances from Sewell and Donovan are shadowed by the stunning Strange.

Maya Strange may be unknown to viewers outside Australia, but through small roles in such films as 'Head On' and "McLeod's Daughters" we down in Oz have watched and waited to see her in a role which does justice to her talent. At only 24, she not only carries her own alongside Donovan and Sewell - but also carries the film itself, appearing in almost every scene.

The script by Bennet and his wife Jennifer is layered and complex. The photography, by first time DOP Danny Ruhlmann, is exquisite.

If you have an interest in the scenery of the Pacific islands, then by all means see this film - there are some wonderful wide-screen images of the islands and their people to be had. Hats off to the crew (the director and camera crew in particular) who worked in tough, often muddy, conditions.

But if you are after an engaging and entertaining story involving characters you can identify with or against, then you're in for a let down. Put simply, "In A Savage Land" drags.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a film with a relaxed pace - not every movie has to be chop-chop, bang-bang. But this film just takes too long to say what it has to say. Even at the Brisbane premiere (the director/co-writer's home town), with an apparently friendly audience, I could hear people fidgeting during some scenes. I don't think it was just the serious subject matter to blame. Many scenes just move too slowly for no apparent reason. Modern audiences don't respond to this.

There is also the problem of the somewhat shallow depictions of the central characters. We never really seem to get to know the central couple, and this was meant to be (I assume) a character piece. Maya Stange's changes in attitude and appearance are just too much to believe, and it was difficult to fathom her motivations. Her husband's views on how to conduct his research and his marriage go past blinkered or even prejudiced, they appear just plain foolish.

The islander characters are even more closed off to the audience, with the unscrupulous traders providing the only real (if limited) insight into their islander ways.

The most obvious place to lay the blame for why the film doesn't work is the script. It seems underdeveloped, though I believe there was much work done in the edit suite during post-production, so it's hard to know what the original script looked like.

All the actors seem to give credible performances, and moments where the performances seem less than impressive seem to be the fault of the script, not the actors. But it's so hard to say, looking in from the outside.

All in all a disappointing film from a very talented writer/director. "In A Savage Land" had a short run in Australian theatres, which is all the more upsetting when you realise it was one of the more expensive Australian films made for several years (around ten million dollars according to the director).