A Film Canon

A beautiful and complex consideration of indigenous representation, The Last Wave turns on corporate tax barrister David Burton's (Richard Chamberlain) unexpected assignation to an indigenous murder case, over the course of which he develops a supernatural affinity with the Sydney indigenous community - especially Chris Lee (Gulpilil) - and shares in their communal vision of an imminent, watery apocalypse. On the one hand, David's quite convincingly told, by a colleage who's spent ten years defending and promoting indigenous legal rights, that his belief that supernatural tribal practices are still prevalent among urban indigenous communities is the worst kind of "middle-class patronising attitude...idiotic romantic crap." On the other hand, this "romantic crap" is exactly what the film so majestically aestheticises, through a cinematographic liquidity that makes it feel as if water is continually pouring out of the camera in the same way that it does David's car radio, or that the constant backdrops of rain and wind soaked windows are so many ciphers for the lens itself; the vortical, electrified fluidity that lurks just above the plughole, drain, or other gateway to the sewer-underworld. Add to this the fairly indiscriminate conflation of indigenous Australian iconography with that of virtually every other continent, culminating with the subterranean portal to the Dreamtime that David eventually discovers and that looks more like something off Easter Island than anything endemic to Australia. Add also the simplistic curatorial ruminations on the Dreamtime itself, which recall the self-defeating discursions of the Universal horror cycle, and it's difficult to know exactly how to read the film's exquisite beauty. Given David's supernatural affinity with the indigenous community, it feels as if Weir's intention is not merely to aestheticise a certain middle-class projection of indigenous exoticism, but to explore its counterpart - a fantasy of indigenous affinity, based on a conception of the indigenous that is both imagistically unformulated and imagistically sublime; that is, a conception that is inherently cinematic, and finds its cinematic epitome in the dream wave - or, rather, wave footage - that concludes his vision.