JM (Rikiya Kurokawa), a young Japanese salesman, leads a solitary, uneventful life in Tokyo, his only company a couple of rare snakes. But he dreams of owning a very special car - a late 1960s Citroën, the legendary model DS (in French: Déesse, or "Goddess") via the internet, he makes contact with a potential seller and flies to Australia to close the deal.
At the airport, however, his contact is nowhere to be seen, and when JM goes to visit him at his home, he finds the man and his wife dead, apparently after an argument over money, and a young blind girl - BG (Rose Byrne) - guarding a small child. She invites the visitor to test drive the DS; he does, and is at once seduced. The car, BG explains, was not actually the dead man's to sell - but, she adds, she can take him to meet the real owner. JM agrees, and together these two isolated souls embark on a journey that will take them deep into the Australian outback and also into their own pasts.
For BG, it means recalling her troubled, ultimately tragic relationship with her mother, reliving a violent teenage encounter with a young boxer and, finally, confronting her aging, abusive grandfather. For JM, it means entering an alien landscape, a harsh and frequently hostile world - all the while fleeing a painful memory that forced him to leave Japan. Before long, their separate quests become one: a shared desire to transcend the past and find redemption, achieved under the benevolent eye of the goddess.
Special Agent Matti
Definitely not Heaven's burning.
Connoisseurs of art must see The goddess of 1967 to check out the use of saturated colours, high contrast film stock and polarising filters. Followers of road movies must see The goddess of 1967 to experience life in the blind lane. Romantics must see The goddess of 1967 to fall in love with two completely inappropriate souls.
Clara and Eddie give you a film in which each scene builds on every scene that comes before it. The geometric progression rises to dizzying heights before plunging you deep beneath the Earth. From the clouds to the grave, the goddess feels your every move.
The goddess of 1967 is definitely not a mainstream film, if only for bringing a foreigner and a cripple onto the screen and it plays with the connections between the two sides of your brain. Some scenes must simply be experienced while others have to be analysed to the nth degree. Rikiya and Rose form an on-screen bond that works because of their differences rather than despite of them. He is a man lost in a foreign country, she is a woman lost in a country that should be her own but never can be. It's cool.
If you're looking for a good, solid, thought provoking, stimulating film, The goddess of 1967 is the one for you. See it.
MA 15+ (Adult themes, medium level violence, medium level sex scenes)
118 minutes (1:58 hours)
Film: 5 September 2001
VHS rental: 27 February 2002
