Children of the Revolution
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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One day Fraser gets a visit from David Hoyle (Sam Neill), apparently an Australian spy who’s intercepted one of her letters to Stalin, and he gives her a friendly warning. She visits the Soviet Union in 1953–after Stalin (F. Murray Abraham) happens on a file of her letters and invites her to come–a complex journey traced by a succession of red stars on a map. Hoyle, apparently now working as a spy for the Russians, follows her. Fraser attends a banquet and a midnight screening of a Hollywood movie with Stalin (we hear Satchmo singing “Just One of Those Things” as Stalin puts his arm around her); later we see her come out of Stalin’s bedroom looking distraught. Learning later that Stalin has just died, she swears she doesn’t recall what happened the previous night. Hoyle comforts her, and she appears to wind up in bed with him as well.
In making some sense of this fresh and provocative movie, it may help to know that writer-director Peter Duncan’s grandfather was a card-carrying Australian communist in the 40s who adhered to his principles for the remainder of his life. (It’s probably also useful to bear in mind that Sam Neill, who plays Hoyle, is a New Zealander and is perceived in Australia as a foreigner.) But the most pertinent piece of information I have is an anecdote told to me by an Australian film and TV director who several years ago made a documentary about Australian Jewish Holocaust survivors. When he asked them why they’d moved to Australia, nearly all of them gave the same answer: they wanted to get as far away from where they’d been as possible.
No less clever is the tweaking of American culture–I especially liked it when Fraser, after watching Gorbachev on TV, went into a tirade that ended “The devil is Ronald McDonald”–and the implication that Hoyle’s procommunist and anticommunist espionage may have amounted to the same thing, especially for those vast sectors of the world that were neither American nor Soviet. (For less powerful countries like Australia, the similarities between the Soviet Union and the U.S.–as international monoliths and bullies–may have been more important than the differences.) Again like Lubitsch, Duncan has a witty and humane perspective on personal, political, and historical events that’s largely a matter of maintaining a balanced if sympathetic distance from them.
