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Heatwave (1982)

 


Heatwave (1982) is the fifth film I’ve spotlighted since August from the resourceful, intermittently underrated and overrated Phillip Noyce. While this exercise has not engendered any major reevaluation or revelation about his work—due in part to highlighting three fairly mainstream American works (The Bone Collector, Salt, The Giver) and one raw early work (Backroads)—revisiting his collaborations with Angelina Jolie on The Bone Collector and Salt has reinforced Noyce’s adept handling of actresses. This trait—not one necessarily shared by other thinking man’s action film directors like John McTiernan, Tony Scott, Michael Mann, or Christopher Nolan—is also evident in Noyce’s work with Nicole Kidman on Dead Calm, Everlyn Sampi on Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Judy Davis on Heatwave.

Heatwave is based in part on the story of missing journalist Juanita Nielsen, also dramatized in Donald Crombie’s The Killing of Angel Street one year earlier; here, it is Mary Ford, a reporter advocating against a major building development that will demolish historic lower-income terrace homes, who disappears. However, the film focuses on two characters in Mary's orbit—activist Kate Dean (Davis) and architect Stephen West (Richard Moir)—as they unpeel the onion of this mystery, surrounded by wonderful, weathered character actor faces and voices in the forms of Chris Haywood, Bill Hunter, and John Meillon. Davis and Moir are all-too-human anchors, with Davis in particular—in one of several contemporary turns (see also Hoodwink) between her frocked local and global star-making turns in My Brilliant Career and A Passage to India—offering a finely calibrated and coiled performance.

The true crime roots, sweaty setting, and Noyce’s presence as director led me to expect more of a thriller from Heatwave. Had Noyce directed it a decade later, after Deal Calm, Blind Fury, and Patriot Games, I suspect it would have had a thriller patina with sparse but propulsive beats throughout. However, the film is more a character study and rumination on class, with its final chase scene feeling obligatory and degenerative. I was reminded more than once of John Birmingham’s scathing Leviathan: The Unauthorized Biography of Sydney, in which the author sketches a shadow history of the city built upon all manner of skullduggery and the machinations of the elite. 

Noyce and DP Vincent Monton—whose previous excellent work included Newsfront, Long Weekend, Snapshot, Thirst, and Road Games—capture some of the grit of old inner Sydney (as does The Last Wave), but also its bold and brassy nouveau spheres (with shades here of Ruben Guthrie and Emerald City, also featuring Chris Haywood as a Trumpian poseur). Similar to The Last Wave’s final titular tidal wave and Dak City’s finale where the protagonist conjures beach and daylight, post-final chase Heatwave ends with a storm, breaking its titular weather and suggesting rebirth, though here both old and new Sydney are amongst the collateral damage.

Ben

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