MWFF Critics Lab on The Goddess of 1967
In this article, MWFF Critics Lab mentees Erika Lay and Chelsea Daniel share their thoughts on a divisive film in this year’s Melbourne Women in Film Festival: Clara Law’s The Goddess of 1967. Erika and Chelsea offer their critical reflections here, both for and against the film.
Clara Law’s Psychogeography of Alienation in The Goddess of 1967 by Erika Lay
For director Clara Law, landscapes of austerity and unboundedness — the ultra-blue saturation of Tokyo’s cityscape, the sparsity of the Australian Outback — map out something less like a spatial rendering of geographical locations, than the shifting interiorities of the unrooted psyche. Or at least, these are the terms by which Law maps out a psychogeography of alienation, in her 2000 film The Goddess of 1967. When an affluent Japanese man (JM) travels to rural Australia to purchase a model of a Citroën DS as an object promising release from the depths of a listless ennui, he finds the car under the possession of a blind girl (BG). Sedimented from the depths of their respective pasts — JM from the shock of tragic circumstances in Tokyo, and BG from the intergenerational trauma of sexual-abuse — the two embark on the Citroën DS across rural Australia in a journey that marks the literal search for its real owner, and the search for absolution from the traumatic past.
In the drive across rural Australia, Law sketches out a psychogeography of alienation: what mobility might look like, when displaced from one’s initial roots of belonging. Interspersed by cross-cutting sequences between the past and the present, Law situates the journey within the Citroën DS as a kind of liminal space: caught between JM’s memories of Tokyo’s cityscape, whose inverted color-schemes are rendered in an estranging harshness, and the uncanny green-screen landscapes of the present-day Australia, whose hues beyond the car meld into the uncanny brightness of blue-skies and green fields. In this space, alienation is rendered in spaces of the in-between, of being perpetually in transit. Through a series of flashback sequences, it is revealed that BG has spent years in fruitless search for a sighted driver to drive her to the real owner of the car — and her supposed form of absolution from the past — embodying a tragic state of stasis, and a form of movement without mobility. Law captures this unmoored state of being rendered in-between with the following: “Neither silent or moving… neither perceivable or imperceptible; neither nothing or everything… that is what I tried to capture in this film.”
Such a practice of evocation invariably faces the challenge of impressing upon viewers an unmoored sense of alienation, without uncoupling the film from its method of doing so. And in some ways, the film achieves this when Law’s excavations of displacement are grounded in the local — the present-day scenes of the Citroën DS. In such sequences, Law fleshes out the alternative spaces that might be formed in navigating the immediacy of the other, whilst movement is unmoored by place, time and name. In the car, when BG asks JM to describe what living in Tokyo is like, JM provides the single-word responses, “Mars,” and “Noodles”: revealing something of the porous gap between language and belonging through which the characters navigate these spaces, and each other. In such scenes whose edges appear to diffuse into darkness — BG musing about the sound of the death of insects in the liminal space of the car, and the two companions’ dancing figures within a dim-lit dance-hall — BG and JM’s interactions are imbued with a haunting intimacy. Absolution, instead, Law suggests, might be found in exerting traction against the awkward sincerity of the other.
Yet these moments are sparse and in-between. Law’s practice of mapping out these diffuse, non-linear impressions of the alienated present come into tension with the film’s broader structure of the linear journey: a structural tension that tethers the film to contrived sequences, including a scene in which in BG and JM drive towards the horizon blinded, in an overly obvious metaphor of being blinded by the past. In rendering the present as laden with the past, The Goddess of 1967 furthermore weighs the journey with it, quite literally: at least half of the film’s running time is submerged in protracted flashback sequences of JM’s and BG’s experiences, foreclosing the film from rendering the alternative spaces that are formed whilst navigating the alienated present. While one may argue that this emerges as part of Law’s practice of evocation-as-commentary, the effect is a form of stasis that leans towards the tautologically reductive: when burdened with the past, the present is lived through the past — a feeling that comes close to inhabiting the viewing experience, itself.
A film that still travels far by Chelsea Daniel
“What's a movie like,” JM (standing for Japanese Man ) asks BM (standing for Blind Girl), not because he doesn’t know, but to understand her. “It's people laughing, and kissing, and fucking each other in the dark”. Laughing, kissing and fucking (in the dark!) are in 2000’s Goddess of 1967, though it's not precisely the one-liner I’d go with. The postmodernist film follows hacker JM (Rikiya Kurokawa) travelling to remote Australia to pursue a 1967 Citröen DS model, nicknamed The Goddess. When JM arrives, he finds the seller killed himself and his wife. He meets BG (Rose Byrne), who offers to take JM to the actual car owner, who happens to be her grandfather, whom she plans to kill. It is a premise, and a movie to admire and remember, though sometimes uncomfortable.
The film remains timeless and breathtaking in its visuals. The car is a pink salmon, a moving object juxtaposed with the ever-constant harsh and dull Australian outback this film spends most of its time on; it is simply delightful to look at. It is one of the many examples of Law playing with the balance between the beautiful against the brutal.
This balance is reoccurring, which plays well later when JM stops to see a bobtail lizard. JM is excited to encounter this lizard, but the lizard bites him. JM is in pain, but BG explains it is a love bite. He has to wait for the lizard to let go, and the two wait on the side of the road, sitting in front of a dehydrated grassy hill. In the vastness of cruelty, the only comfort is with each other. How do we receive love from something that doesn’t express it how we expect it to, and moreover, how can we find joy and beauty in the harshness, and why can there be harshness in joy and beauty?
Where the film limits itself can be credited to personal taste. The film takes pleasure in its coldness and abstraction of its characters, which may be expected in films of the post-modern style, but understanding this doesn’t make experiencing this gratifying. The nameless characters are vessels of Law’s themes, two characters who are trying to understand themselves in their lives in constant transit. But in this, the characterisations fall prey to easy tropes. Take BG’s backstory: though devastating, it fails to remind grounded. Flashbacks are a simple tick-in-the-box for plot development rather than a character rounding. There is also the question of the depiction of her disability, which can fit the parameters of the “magical” disabled girl trope. The two characters' most magical moments are when we’re allowed in and when it doesn’t push us away. We’re just not let in that often.
I’m willing to concede my failure to fully appreciate might just be a lack of appreciation of the style. It would be wrong not to recognise its place in the Australian canon from the visual magnitude of it alone. It deserves its own place, though it is not a place I choose to return to.