The Last Wave
| The Last Wave | |
|---|---|
Theatrical poster
|
|
| Directed by | Peter Weir |
| Produced by | Hal and Jim McElroy |
| Written by | Peter Weir Tony Morphett Petru Popescu |
| Starring |
Richard Chamberlain Olivia Hamnett David Gulpilil Fred Parslow |
| Music by | Charles Wain |
| Cinematography | Russell Boyd |
| Edited by | Max Lemon |
|
Production
company |
Ayer Productions
|
| Distributed by | World Northal (US) |
|
Release date
|
13 December 1977 (Australia) January 1979 (US) |
|
Running time
|
106 minutes |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Budget | A$818,000 |
| Box office | A$1,258,000 (Aust) US$866,250 (US) |
The Last Wave (released as Black Rain in the United States) is an Australian mystery drama film from 1977, directed by Peter Weir. It is about a white solicitor in Sydney whose seemingly normal life is disrupted after he takes on a murder case and discovers that he shares a strange, mystical connection with the small group of local Australian Aborigines accused of the crime.
The film opens with a montage of scenes of daily life in Australia in the 1970s: a rural school in the desert, the main street of an outback town, a traffic jam in the city, all being affected by unusually adverse weather conditions that suddenly appear. Only the local Aboriginal people seem to recognize the cosmological significance of these weather phenomena.
During one of these "freak rainstorms" in Sydney, an altercation occurs among a group of Aborigines in a pub, which results in the mysterious death of one of them. At the coroner's inquest, the death is ruled a homicide; and four men are accused of murder. Through the Australian Legal Aid system, David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) is procured for their defence. The circumstances by which he was contacted and retained are unusual, in that his law practice is corporate taxation and not criminal defense. He nonetheless takes on the case, and his professional and personal lives begin to unravel.
Plagued by bizarre dreams, Burton begins to sense an otherworldly connection to one of the accused (David Gulpilil). He also feels connected to the increasingly strange weather phenomena besetting the city. His dreams intensify along with his obsession with the murder case, which he comes to believe is an Aboriginal tribal killing by curse, in which the victim believed. Learning more about Aboriginal practices and the concept of Dreamtime as a parallel world of existence, Burton comes to believe the strange weather bodes of a coming apocalypse.
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Wikipedia