''The Goddess of 1967'' is a 2000 Australian film directed by
Macau
Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...
-born Australian
Clara Law
Clara Law Cheuk-yiu (, born 29 May 1957 in Macau) is a Hong Kong Second Wave film director. Law currently resides in Australia.
Early life
Clara Law was born on 29 May 1957 in Macau. At the age of 10 she moved to Hong Kong. Law studied at the U ...
, who wrote the script with her husband (and previous script collaborator) Eddie Ling-Ching Fong.
The film is about a rich young Japanese man (Rikiya Kurokawa), who travels to Australia with the intention of buying a
Citroën DS
The Citroën DS () is a Front-mid-engine, front-wheel-drive layout, front mid-engined, front-wheel drive executive car manufactured and marketed by Citroën from 1955 to 1975, in fastback/sedan, wagon/estate, and convertible body configurations ...
car (the goddess of the film's title - nicknamed the ''Déesse'', after its initials in
French, ''déesse'' being French for "goddess") that he has found for sale on the internet. Once there, things do not go as planned and he ends up on a road trip with a blind girl (
Rose Byrne
Mary Rose Byrne (born 24 July 1979) is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut in the film ''Dallas Doll'' (1994), and continued to act in Australian film and television throughout the 1990s. She obtained her first leading film role i ...
).
It won several awards, including
Best Actress
Best Actress is the name of an award which is presented by various film, television and theatre organisations, festivals, and people's awards to leading actresses in a film, television series, television film or play. The first Best Actress awar ...
for
Rose Byrne
Mary Rose Byrne (born 24 July 1979) is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut in the film ''Dallas Doll'' (1994), and continued to act in Australian film and television throughout the 1990s. She obtained her first leading film role i ...
at the 2000
Venice Film Festival
The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival ( it, Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, "International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale") is an annual film festival he ...
and best director at the Chicago Film Festival.
The song from the dance scene between BG and JM is
Walk-Don't Run "Walk, Don't Run" is an instrumental composition written and originally recorded by jazz guitarist Johnny Smith in 1954.
It was later adapted and re-recorded by Chet Atkins in 1956, and was a track on the LP ''Hi-Fi In Focus''. This arrangement ...
(the
1964 version) by
The Ventures
The Ventures are an American instrumental rock band formed in Tacoma, Washington, in 1958, by Don Wilson and Bob Bogle. The band, which was a quartet for most of its existence, helped to popularize the electric guitar across the world during the ...
. The song is not included on the film's
soundtrack
A soundtrack is recorded music accompanying and synchronised to the images of a motion picture, drama, book, television program, radio program, or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack o ...
, which contains the score by Jen Anderson.
Plot
![The Corragated Church (6694133395)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/The_Corragated_Church_%286694133395%29.jpg)
The storyline opens in Tokyo where JM (Rikiya Kurokawa), a rich young IT worker and sometime computer hacker, is attempting to purchase a 1967 model Citroën DS, or Goddess, as it is known to French car aficionados. JM lives in a pristine but unfriendly hi-tech apartment. The smog filled city is blue-grey and bleak. He rarely speaks to his live-in girlfriend and is preoccupied with other possessions—his latest snorkeling gear as well as the pet snakes and other exotic reptiles he keeps in the flat. After tracing, on the Internet, a perfectly restored Citroën owned by a couple in Australia, JM abandons his job and flies out to purchase the rare car, which he thinks can fill the emptiness in his life.
No one meets JM at the airport but he eventually finds the home where the car is located and meets BG (
Rose Byrne
Mary Rose Byrne (born 24 July 1979) is an Australian actress. She made her screen debut in the film ''Dallas Doll'' (1994), and continued to act in Australian film and television throughout the 1990s. She obtained her first leading film role i ...
), a blind and emotionally unstable young woman. BG, who is minding a young child, explains that the couple did not actually own the Citroën and that the husband shot his wife and then killed himself after a violent argument over money. She shows him the car and tells him, after he has test driven it, that she can take him to its real owner, who is somewhere in the
Outback
The Outback is a remote, vast, sparsely populated area of Australia. The Outback is more remote than the bush. While often envisaged as being arid, the Outback regions extend from the northern to southern Australian coastlines and encompass a n ...
, a five-day drive away. Intoxicated by the vehicle, JM agrees. BG abandons the child at a service station, instructing her not to trust anyone, after calling the police to pick the girl up.
As BG and JM journey into the spectacular but harsh landscape, the viewer is taken on a series of complex and often confusing flashbacks which attempt to illustrate the dark tragedies that have shaped their respective lives. JM became fabulously wealthy after a friend gave him the computer password to a major bank. The friend, who claims the reason he is not using the password himself is that he is getting married, is run over and killed by a passing truck. JM's infatuation with the car is apparently an attempt to fill the emotional gap created by his friend's death and the barren life he leads in Tokyo, which, he tells BG, is alien and "just like Mars".
Flashbacks reveal BG was sexually attacked three years earlier by a young boxer from a travelling circus, who is frustrated in his attempts by a
Chastity belt
A chastity belt is a locking item of clothing designed to prevent sexual intercourse or masturbation. Such belts were historically designed for women, ostensibly for the purpose of chastity, to protect women from rape or to dissuade women and the ...
. BG then escaped into the bush where she was protected by wild dingoes. As a young child, she was also sexually abused by her grandfather (who is her blood father) and traumatised by Marie (Elise McCredie), her disoriented and deeply religious mother. Grandpa (
Nicholas Hope
Nicholas Hope (born 25 December 1958) is a British-born Australian actor.
Born in Manchester, England, Hope's family emigrated to the steel and ship building town of Whyalla, South Australia, where he was educated by the Christian Brothers.
...
), who was a hippie, a wine maker and then an opal miner, believes his outback existence frees him from all moral constraints.
BG's favourite radio show is the obituary notices program and she is infatuated by the sound of insects splattering on the Citroën's windscreen, which, she explains to JM, is the "sound of death". Although blind, BG carries a pistol which she fires occasionally: the first time at two sinister men who pull alongside the car during JM's test drive and later, in the outback, to destroy the radio she uses to listen to the obituary notices. Unbeknownst to JM, BG's grandfather owns the car and she is leading JM to him not to consummate the car's sale but in order to kill the old man.
In the course of their journey through an unremittingly hostile world inhabited by cruel outback men and women, the couple become friends and, after JM teaches BG how to dance, tentative lovers. BG eventually finds her grandfather and confronts him in his rundown opal mine. She had planned to shoot him but, having reconciled her past in the course of the trip and found someone who genuinely cares for her, decides not to go ahead with it. The film ends with BG and JM travelling off together in the Citroën, both having come to terms with their past.
Production Details
The budget for the film was around AUD$3m. The film was shot in Tokyo and in and around
Lightning Ridge
Lightning Ridge is a small outback town in north-western New South Wales, Australia. Part of Walgett Shire, Lightning Ridge is situated near the southern border of Queensland, about east of the Castlereagh Highway. The Lightning Ridge area is ...
in
New South Wales
)
, nickname =
, image_map = New South Wales in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of New South Wales in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = Australia
, established_title = Before federation
, es ...
, Australia in late 1999.
Box office
''The Goddess of 1967'' grossed $103,449 at the box office in Australia.
''Film Victoria - Australian Films at the Australian Box Office''
/ref>
See also
* '' Cold Fever'' – a 1995 film in which a successful Japanese man travels to Iceland in a newly purchased bright red Citroën DS and meets strange characters.
* ''My Blueberry Nights
''My Blueberry Nights'' is a 2007 romantic drama film directed by Wong Kar-wai, his first feature in English. The screenplay by Wong and Lawrence Block is based on a Chinese-language short film written and directed by Wong. ''My Blueberry Nights' ...
'' – a 2007 film in which a woman drifts throughout America to buy a car she had always wanted, which her companion uses on a road trip to confront her father.
References
External links
*
''The Goddess of 1967'' at the National Film and Sound Archive
''The Goddess of 1967''
a
Ozmovies
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goddess of 1967, The
2000 films
2000 comedy-drama films
Australian comedy-drama films
Incest in film
Films about blind people
Films directed by Clara Law
Films shot in New South Wales
Films shot in Tokyo
2000s English-language films