Today to many films create pleasure to the view by giving what the audience expects and for some reason it is pleasurable to watch something have your expectations meet whether bad or good. There is a wonderful, unsettling sense of displacement in the opening of Craig Lahiff's Heaven's Burning. Where are we? What city is this? What country? Japanese business people file in and out of a hotel. "A honeymooning couple, Yukio and Midori, eat dinner at a restaurant where the waiters are in full Greek costume; the couple discusses Greece. "But are the waiters real Greeks?" asks Yukio. What, indeed, is real?" (annotated from http://www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=41074).
Nor are his and Midori's attempts to play the role of a temperate Japanese business couple - the strain shows on Yukio's face when politeness forces him away from his new wife for an hour, to have a drink with cronies. A fatal hour, as it turns out - when Yukio returns, Midori is gone, already well on her way to becoming the more resourceful half of a bank-robbing Bonnie and Clyde duo fleeing across Australia.
We are, after all, in Australia. Or is this heaven? Midori insists she "can be free" in this "strange country," despite racism which ranges from the mild dislike emanating from her new boyfriend's father, to a trucker's punches and kicks. "I can breathe!" she yells, from the sun roof of a souped-up car, despite murderous pursuit by Yukio, the Australian police and an ex-Soviet torturer who lost his son in a botched robbery involving Midori and her true love, Colin.
What really makes this film so priceless is American audiences have been trained to expect Hollywood reactions to plot points and Lahiff ignores all that. Like I said previously we expect things to happen and we take pleasure whether we realize it or not that our expectations are fulfilled.Every event in this film causes a pivot reaction, going beyond or around or above expectations.
Leo: blonde hair, blue eyes, pale, flirt. ... Kit rolled her eyes. ... Kit rolled her eyes. ... The kids lept to their feet and followed him down a hallway, into an unfamilar room. ... Belinda rolled her eyes. ...