"Paradise Road" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL April 26, 1997 "Paradise Road" opened here this week and is playing at a few theaters throughout the area. It is a dramatized account of the true story of a group of women of British, Dutch, Australian, and various other nationalities who were held prisoner by the Japanese in Sumatra during World War II. It boasts a magnificent ensemble cast led by Glenn Close, Pauline Collins, and Frances McDormand. Because the film recounts the horrors these women faced when incarcerated under a brutal regime that never signed on to the Geneva Convention and so recognized no rules about the humane treatment of prisoners of war, the violence on the screen is horrific and difficult to watch (though probably pales in comparison to what it was actually like in these camps). Nonetheless it seems to me that director Bruce Beresford could have been a bit less literal- minded and could have made his points about their treatment equally well without actually showing such things as a women being immolated. Her comrades' horror-filled reactions would have told it all (as they do when he uses this technique later in the film). Nonetheless, this is not essentially a film about the horrors of war but about the human spirit and its manifestations in such times of crisis. In conditions of utter depravity and deprivation, where women are dying daily from starvation and disease and a simple lack of the will to live, two of the women, played by Glenn Close and Pauline Collins, discover a common bond. These are women who would have never even spoken to one another in their pre-war stations in life where diplomats' wives and missionary ladies would never come in contact with one another. But in the camp the discover that they are both classically trained musicians. One of them was blessed with what amounted to a photographic memory for the orchestral scores she had studied. Together they hatched the extraordinary idea of forming an orchestra there in the prison camp--but since they had no instruments they invented the idea of a vocal orchestra. After selling enough of the other women in the camp on the idea, they went to work. Since they were forbidden to congregate, they had to learn their parts in small groups and in secrecy. When they finally gave their first performance (of the Largo movement from Dvorak's New World Symphony) the sheer beauty of the music they made touched not only the other prisoners, but even their guards who stopped in their tracks to listen instead of brutally breaking up the assembly as they started out to do. Glenn Close is just luminous in these scenes where she is conducting the orchestra; her joy is palpable. At the end of the film we learn from titles projected on the screen that during 1943-44 these women wrote out, learned, and performed over forty orchestral works. The arrangements survived the war and were performed for the film by a choir of Dutch nuns, I believe from the same order as the Dutch nuns who were among those incarcerated in the camp. These remarkable efforts are certainly testimony to the extraordinary heights the human spirit can reach, and this is the moving heart of the film. But one of the things I liked about the film was that it did not just dwell on the ennobling aspects of these women; rather, it showed them as human beings struggling under the most extreme duress, the results of which were hardly always noble. It showed their own racist, classist, and nationalistic biases. It showed, and did not judge, women who chose to go to serve as "comfort women" for Japanese officers in the hope that this would provide them with a more comfortable existence and a better chance for survival. It showed women who were negative and disruptive throughout the whole experience as well as those who were above all self-protective and others whose kindness was unstinting. Frances McDormand's character was one of the most interesting--ostensibly a German physician, she kept her distance from the others and exploited her tenuous position as an "ally" of the Japanese and a doctor (who removed gold fillings from corpses to barter for medicine with the guards). Rather than an ally, she was in fact a Jewish refugee from the Nazis and occasionally the object of distrust and anti-Semitic outbursts from her fellow prisoners. This Australian led multinational production, "Paradise Road" (named after a line in a poem that one of the prisoners read over the grave of one of the first women in their group to die) is a fitting tribute to the courage and resiliency of the women who survived this ordeal (some of whom are still living) and a tribute as well to those who did not survive. I urge you to see it, but do it quickly for it will not be attracting large audiences and won't be around for very long. For the WMNF "Women's Show" this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.