Peter Weir\u2019s films traverse the world \u2013 Belize, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, the US, the Australian outback. Only a select few are set in Sydney, the city of his birth. The last of them was his 1977 film, The Last Wave.<\/p>\n
After his break-out success, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave brings a similarly eerie treatment of Australia\u2019s biggest city, with Weir conveying the nation\u2019s anxieties about displacement and difference to pose fundamental questions about justice and spirituality.<\/p>\n
The film follows David Burton (Richard Chamberlain), a white lawyer who forays out of corporate taxation to represent four Aboriginal men accused of murder in a pro bono act of goodwill. David starts grappling with prophetic nightmares of his world being swept away in a devastating flood, as well as being visited in dreams by one of the men he is representing, Chris Lee (David Gulpilil).<\/p>\n
Weir opts for a poetic approach over a straight procedural treatment of two contradicting modes of justice: a colonial legal system and a far older tradition of Aboriginal law. The film extends this beyond a conflict of custom into an existential reckoning. Weir uses rain in a spectacular fashion \u2013 almost every scene is drenched to the bone \u2013 which evokes a now-familiar sense that irregular weather events herald some kind of apocalypse.<\/p>\n
From the outside, the killing appears to be manslaughter, a bar fight gone wrong. The group give little more explanation than: \u201cBilly died, that\u2019s all.\u201d But David comes to realise what the audience has known from the outset: this was an execution, in retribution for the theft of sacred objects. The killing is enacted according to Aboriginal law, which seems to manifest as an otherworldly force; when Chris and the men corner Billy (Athol Compton), the torrential rains clear for the first time and the foreboding, dreamlike soundscape rises.<\/p>\n
Chamberlain\u2019s excellent performance as a well-heeled lawyer far out of his depth is delivered with dignity and delightful English elocution, and earned him a nomination for best actor at the Australian Film Institute awards that year. As his premonitions of the titular, eventually literal last wave intensify, he delivers a spiral of dread and revelatory awe with gravitas and sincerity.<\/p>\n
Gulpilil in The Last Wave. Peter Weir credited the actor as bring crucial to the film\u2019s development. Photograph: TCD\/Prod.DB\/Alamy<\/p>\n
Chamberlain\u2019s performance is only exceeded by Gulpilil. The late Yolngu cinematic icon began acting in Nicolas Roeg\u2019s Walkabout (1971), another film in which his charismatic stoicism suggests another world, something existing beyond the superficial trappings of white society. Weir later credited Gulpilil as being crucial to The Last Wave\u2019s development: \u201cI realised the absurdity of the history books. Talking with David, I realised the [Aboriginal] culture was very much alive, if underground, so to speak.\u201d<\/p>\n