1984's hurt dream

THE EVER optimistic i.iblirdiers would have had us
Belie that this was to be the :,fear of the book — George Orwell's 1984, that is.
January saw the novel a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, television cameras jostling for views of Wigan, and Sunday newspapers outdoing themselves with revelations about Orwell's singularly dull life.
But, typically fickle this, the media seemed to have lost interest before we were far into February. Not so much the year of the book as a book of the month.
And no bad thing either. But Orwell's gloomy and humourless work refuses to go
away. Now comes 1984 ("15", Odeon Haymarket) the film,
which in fact surpasses expectations and will surely be something of a landmark for the re-emergent British film industry.
Refusing to be overawed by his task of bringing a literary classic to the screen, the director and writer of the screenplay, Michael Radford, displays a genuinely creative intelligence.
His adaptation of the novel effectively fleshes out some characters, dispenses with others; avoids the datedness of some of the original dialogue; and neatly streamlines the story. Of course, the nightmarish
Orwellian world its
nightmarish events remain.
Winston Smith (John Hurt) is 1984's anti-hero, a citizen of Oceania, the totalitarian state of the future which matches its authoritarian ambitions with impressively intrusive technology. "Big Brother is watching you", and has omnipresent giant two-way telescreens to help him.
Winston's attraction to Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) — "love" is unknown in this mythical future, except for love of Big Brother — highlights his political, and hence social, heterodoxy.
He is a "thought criminal", and as such is delivered into the hands of O'Brien (Richard Burton) who will interrogate and torture him back to conformity. "They can't get to your heart", Winston has insisted to Julia. Orwell's despairing message is that they can.
If somewhat too langouress early on, John Hurt harrowingly communicates the rising fear and sense of hopelessness induced by his horrifying sufferings. As the inflicter of those sufferings, Richard Burton — in his last film appearance — masterfully captures the workaday banality of his character's evil.
His performance negates the Burton attributes as film star: the rich and strong voice becomes quiet and emptied of feeling, the manner wholly undemonstrative. he acts by not acting, as it were.
Clearly the film-makers could not let 1984 look like our 1984. Nor could it look like Hollywood's vision of the future: high-tech machinery and people dressed in tin foil. Instead they chose firmly to place it at once in 1948 (the year Orwell wrote the novel) and in a future which might have been imagined forty years ago. Which is to say that everything in the film — from typewriters to posters, from gin bottles to helicopters — casts us hack into the past, and sideways (rather than forwards) into a post-war fantasy of the future.
This sense that /984 is both period piece and science fiction is underscored by the way the print of the film has been developed: drained of colour to suggest old war footage, lent a certain luminosity, which suggests unreality.
We'll have more than the year of the book. 1984 will be read long into the future. It is a mark or a film-maker's success that one can predict that the film of 1984 will be watched well into the future too. It is hard to imagine anyone coming up with a better version.
Where The Green Ants Dream ("15", Chelsea Cinema) could be described as the story of the struggle of a group of Australian tribal aborigines to defend a sacred site against the bulldozers of a mining company. But if that suggests some sort of environmental film, a barely concealed documentary, then it is misleading. It is much more than that; as might be supposed when the director is Werner Herzog, whose last film was the highly praised Fitzcarraldo.
Against the impatient violence of the modern industrial world is pitted a doomed tribe of Aborigines. In their quiet and sad dignity, their wisdom. their power to dream, they come to represent all that is worthwhile about our existence. And all that is being destroyed by so-called progress. Which is a heavy philosophical freight for any film to bear.
But Herzog is learning the art
of a gentle comedy which diffuses an overstated pessimism. And learning somehow to listen to and observe his subjects, avoiding that manic egocentricity which was literally embodied in his last hero, Fitzcarraldo, who was very much film-maker-as-hero too. Where The Green Ants Dream is contemplative and poetic, at times angry and despairing, but fully human in its allowance for change and revelation. It is a major work of a major director.
There is clearly nothing major about Nadia ("U", Scene Leicester Square). But any budding young gymnast should enjoy this dramatised biography of Nadia Comaneci, Olympic
gold medallist.
Essentially this is a good television movie, pleasantly enough filmed and acted, with our heroine a victim of the ambitions of parents, coach, and state. Needless to say perhaps, Nadia overcomes all this to prove she is "a real champion".
The Woman In Red ("15", Leicester Square Theatre) gives Gene Wilder the chance to misdirect himself as a middle-aged, married man seeking an affair. It is a chance he makes the most of. As a distraction, Stevie Wonder's soundtrack might be of some assistance, were its blandness not so impressively complementary to the film.