The Last Wave

 For our discussion group, I watched Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977). I saw it when it came out, and remember that I was really impressed by it, but didn't remember more than a few images of water and the sense of an unresolved mystery. The film begins with an inexplicable rain storm from a cloudless sky, followed by massive chunks of hail that break windows and wound a child. The entire opening sequence, of children taking shelter from a natural threat in a schoolhouse reminds us of The Birds. From that moment on, the constant rain in the film is ominous and unsettling. When water is discovered to be flooding a house, it seems to be an intrusion of the outside rain, but turns out it be an overflowing bathtub. Later, during yet another storm, trees come crashing through doors and windows. The boundary between inside and outside is transgressed. What kind of explanations is there for the rain of toads, the rain of oil? Are these plagues, omens? As the film explores the aboriginal ideas of dream time and premonitory dreams, the frontier between natural and supernatural dissolves. The final image of the film, of a huge wave, could be a premonition or the actual arrival of a tsunami, but either way the forces of nature will wipe away the urban world of the white Australian settlers in an apocalyptic cycle. 

One of the points of our discussion was that the film takes on the challenge of representing aboriginal ways of knowing as a mystery that the lawyer protagonist wants to solve, even as he is being forced to reckon with his own dreams as a form of knowledge. The film also portrays aboriginal culture as having a presence and a validity which Australian society tries to suppress and deny, and which is does not know. Both Burton the lawyer and Chris, one of his aboriginal clients, are mediators between the colonial structures of the modern white settler society and another way of apprehending reality through dreams, although where Burton's prophetic dream faculty comes from is only hinted at. Chris leads Burton to a cave beneath the sewers, but doesn't go in with him; they will not be allies in this struggle. Burton faces the last wave alone.

Here is an examination of the trailer that does a lovely job of explaining a lot about the movie: