From the first frame of “The Year of Living Dangerously,” the romantic drama that turned 40 in this year of living anxiously, viewers know they are not in Kansas anymore. Images of Wayang kulit, the ethereal Indonesian shadow puppets, flicker across the screen to a gentle but persistent Javan beat. It is the hypnotic prelude to the turbulent tale of “a love caught in the fire of revolution,” as the film’s 1982 poster promised, and delivered.The romance portrayed is the fictional one that sprang up in the politically overheated Indonesia of the 1960s between the young Australian journalist Guy Hamilton, played by a thinner Mel Gibson, and the British spy Jill Bryant, played by Sigourney Weaver. The movie had three things going for it straight out of the gate: It was a love story not set at New York City or Paris; it was a war movie not about World War II or Vietnam; and it co-starred the remarkable Linda Hunt, who gives the performance of a lifetime playing a man, Billy Kwan, a diminutive Chinese-American photographer. Kwan knows who’s who at Jakarta in the combustible summer of 1965 better than anyone else in the gaggle of resident foreign correspondents, and he opens doors for Hamilton — something the rookie reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation isn’t able to do on his good looks alone. Ms. Hunt’s performance won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.There is little about the film that is not large. That is something the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences likely took into account when it awarded the director, Peter Weir, an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar last month, in a non-televised ceremony. Anyone familiar with Mr. Weir’s wide-ranging oeuvre, from “Gallipoli” to “Dead Poets Society” by way of “Witness” and “The Truman Show,” knows that the Australian filmmaker never shied away from tackling weighty subjects. The turmoil of a giant country distant from American shores but eyed warily from nearby Australia was no Sunday brunch.When Guy Hamilton arrives in Indonesia, the Dutch colonial days are long gone and President Sukarno, the charismatic architect of the 1955 Bandung Conference (and earlier in his career an architect), is still running the show. His is a tenuous hold on power as championing the non-aligned movement proves easier than balancing left and right in his own sprawling and struggling nation. As the economy flounders, the Communist Party of Indonesia, or PKI, rises to become the largest non-ruling communist party in the world.In October 1965, Sukarno blamed the murder of several senior army generals on the PKI and a purge followed in which by most accounts at least half a million people lost their lives. Sukarno held on for a couple more years until he was placed under house arrest and General Suharto took over. Against that backdrop, Mr. Weir weaves a story of intersecting relationships that are not always what they seem. The fulcrum is Billy Kwan, not least because he introduces Guy to Jill, whose official job title is press attaché at the British embassy. Kwan believes that as a Western journalist, Guy has the power to show the world Indonesia’s unsettling poverty under Sukarno’s rule, and possibly alleviate it, but Guy just wants scoops — such as the one about an illicit arms shipment that may or may not be destined for the PKI. In the steam heat of the tropics, it is sometimes hard to tell.Then there is the heat between Mr. Gibson and Ms. Weaver, an almost alchemical rapport remarked upon at the time of the movie’s release by the New York Times’s venerable film critic, Vincent Canby. More recently, the website RogerEbert.com said of the pair that “they’re almost disconcertingly beautiful, and the car seduction scene (set to a lovely piece of music by Vangelis) is some A+ sexy cinema.”Indeed, the soundtrack is a big part of the film’s enduring allure. It was scored by Maurice Jarre, the Frenchman behind the music of the 1965 David Lean epic “Doctor Zhivago.” A sprinkling of Vangelis plus one of the “Four Last Songs” by Richard Strauss (it’s “Beim Schlafengehen,” not “September” as misidentified in the end credits) add sonic sparkle to these sultry mise en scènes, but it is Mr. Jarre’s strange and brilliant fusion of Indonesian and synthesized sounds that lend the film its unforgettable atmosphere. They mirror the tribulations of a nation lurching violently lurching toward a kind of uneasy modernity. Although it may be the kind of violence to which many in the West have become inured, events this past year in Europe and the current upheaval in Peru are reminders of what can happen when the rules break down. That is what gives “The Year of Living Dangerously” much of its relevance some 40 years after it was first released.Yet it is a movie, after all, so emotional resonance also counts, and what lends it that is the romance, which though flirting with the melodramatic packs a big enough punch to almost knock you out in the final frame. There is an Indonesia on the brink of implosion, a creaky airport in bedlam, a besotted and exhausted reporter … and then, like a shot of Stendhal, with an indelible cinematic twist the tide of chaos momentarily recedes, and the mysteries of transportation take over.
