This is another of those "Classic Scenes" from the late Premiere Magazine—this one taken from Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously—that would take one scene that is pivotal and script out the dialogue.
So, Billy Kwan walks into a bar and director Peter Weir photographs it from Billy's perspective—from his shoulder-height, and we're given the world from his perspective. Billy has been narrating the film and we've been made privy to his innermost thoughts. Sur,e other characters are played by actors who are top-lined, but Billy feels like the heart and soul of the movie, the character with whom the film-makers seem to want us to identify. So, when his character cracks...it's a bit of a shock. And the movie barely recovers.
But, we should have seen it coming. Billy may be the smartest guy in the room, but, he's also the least noticed. We get a sense of this at the start of the scene. Billy wanders in, still in shock from the death of the child in the family that he's been trying to help and he's looking for the usual gang of journo's that make a semi-permanent group of barflies. But, his heighth doesn't allow him to see them; he's perpetually peering through a forest of other people in his search. It shouldn't go unnoticed that he goes unnoticed as he makes his way through the crowd. He's practically invisible—which is a blessing as a photojournalist and a curse, personally.
He compensates for this internal and external world-view, by imagining himself a puppet-master—an image utilized in the film—plotting, planning, ascribing motivations gleaned from his cache of files, manipulating, becoming in his own mind his own version of Sukarno.
But, without any real-world power. When things start going South—when the relationship he's developed between Hamilton and Jill risks exposing her as an intelligence agent, and the child of the village woman he's been attempting to help dies—he becomes just another would-be tyrant clinging to the power he only thinks he has. Ironically, he's susceptible to the same disease he's been fighting against. Power corrupts. Even if it's only imagined power.
Poor Billy.
The Set-up: Indonesia during the final days of the Sukarno regime in 1965. A pool of journalists are covering the story, and the one who stands out is Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), a photojournalist of Chinese-Australian heritage. Billy is short of stature, physically and professionally, but he has connections in Indonesia in high places—like Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), working at the British Embassy—and low—he has great sympathy for the Indonesian people, particularly one mother and child, who are having a tough time of it and to whom he regularly provides food and aid. Billy does his research and he has file cabinets of information on them all in his bungalow. It is only when Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson), just assigned in-a-hurry for an Australian TV network to cover the Indonesia crisis, does Billy see a way to make the most of everyone's situations and he takes Hamilton under his wing. But, when Hamilton proves to be professionally callous and the woman's child dies suddenly, Billy's machinations, like, Sukarno's hold on the nation, start to unravel. And so does Billy.
Action.
WALLY O'SULLIVAN: Billy, come over here.
Been looking everywhere for you.
O'SULLIVAN: in a couple of hours.
CURTIS: Give me a break, willya?
KWAN: To Saigon!
There is a hush. CONDON looks uneasily down the bar at ALI.
CURTIS: They'll throw him out of the country!
HAMILTON stands at the doorway.
HAMILTON: Billy?
EXT. ALLEY - NIGHT
The alley is deserted. It is little more than a fissure. its only illumination coming dully from shuttered windows two and three stories up. Garbage is scattered everywhere.
KWAN is not runner. His abbreviated legs work to no avail like a kindergarten child's. HAMILTON overtakes him a blocks his way.
In the half-light, they both cast grotesque shadows on the wall as they stand facing each other, trying to regain control of their breathing.
Words by David Williamson, Peter Weir, Alan Sharp, and C.J. Koch
Pictures by Russell Boyd and Peter Weir
The Year of Living Dangerously is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from M-G-M Home entertainment.
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