THE LAST WAVE (1977)

Director: Peter Weir
Writer: Tony Morphett, Petru Popescu, Peter Weir
Cinematography: Russell Boyd
Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnett, David Gulpilil
Running Time: 106 min.

The Last Wave is the end of the world, a spiritual cleansing of the land through forces of natures, an aboriginal apocalypse.

Richard Chamberlain portrays an ambitious lawyer who, in defending a group of Aborigines accused of murder, gets drawn into their world of mysterious rituals and mystical prophecies as visions of a coming deluge invade his sleep. One of his clients, a young aborigine who also appears in his dreams, explains that the white man may be a spirit himself, brought to earth for its last days. Ghosts can be both material and immaterial, like water.

Director Peter Weir uses water imagery throughout The Last Wave — from the opening scenes of a small town on the Australian plains suddenly pelted by hail from a clear blue sky, to sourceless water rushing down the inner stairs of a suburban house — depicting a modern and rational world that has lost touch with nature and magic.


(return to FILM FEST 2002)

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