Sunday Too Far Away is another – less well known in the United States – Australian New Wave film, and this one is excellent. I absolutely loved it. It's so smart and so affecting.
This is not a film about a strike – despite apparently every synopsis of the film online – although, there is a strike late in the film. Instead Sunday Too Far Away is about labor and laborers as such. We follow a group of laborers led stunningly by Jack Thompson. This is a superb film from start to finish, brilliantly directed by Ken Hannam. The tone is really balanced perfectly between adventure, mourning, Marxist observation, humor, and sublimity. I have nothing but good things to say.
It deserves to be considered alongside the great films about labor and unionizing from this same period in other parts of the world. I am thinking of films like Actas de Marusia (also 1975), I Compagni (1964), Blood on the Land (1965), La Venganza (1958), Ådalen 31 (1969), and The Molly Maguires (1970).
And Jack Thompson truly is brilliant. I am glad Hollywood got Mel Gibson and Sam Neill and Judy Davis out of the Australian New Wave, but we really deserved to get Thompson too. He's just so damn good in this.
No comments:
Post a Comment