miercuri, 7 martie 2018

Smash Palace, written by Roger Donaldson, Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence


Smash Palace, written by Roger Donaldson, Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence


Smash Palace is an excellent name, for it refers to a scrapyard, in preposterous, humorous manner.

One of the writers of the script, Bruno Lawrence, plays the protagonist, Al Shaw, who owns the Smash Palace, the place where wrecks are brought, after going through accidents that have rendered them inoperable.
He is married to Jacqui and they both have a daughter, Georgie, who will be at the center of the drama.

Al Shaw is too busy with his Smash Palace, working on cars and racing at times to be able to observe that the periodical fights with his wife might result in an irreparable damage and possible definitive separation.
One night, instead of going out with his wife to a festivity, with singing and drinking, he lets her go on her own, where she has the company of the local police officer, Ray Foley, who is a friend of the family.

Jacqui has a few too many drinks, she becomes ebullient and inviting, as Ray drives her home, late into the night, where the husband is asleep in bed, when the friend and his wife arrive at their house.
Jacqui is unhappy with her life in New Zealand; the film was made in 1980, when the situation in this Kiwi land was not as prosperous as it is today.

She wants her husband to abandon his tinkering, which seems to keep him busy all the time, while neglecting his spouse and daughter, sell the property, for which he could get half a million dollars…New Zealand currency maybe.
Al Shaw is not just reluctant, he rejects the idea, for he is confident that this is Heaven on Earth and everything is superb, happy as he is with his family, the garage and the automobiles, plus the racing.

Even if he turns out to be a sort of complicated character, if not an outright antihero, the protagonist might be the one who is right on the matter of moving to Australia or some other promised land.

Quintessential writers, thinkers, professors and psychologists have demonstrated that we believe in some myths, wrong perspectives on what would make us happy and you can find about that in classics like:

Stumbling Upon Happiness by Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert or The Myths of Happiness by another brilliant author- Sonja Lyubomirsky

Men and women tend to believe that, if they only moved to California, the Caribbean or some other sunny, earthly heaven everything will be wonderful and they will be happy and joyful for the rest of their lives.
Only when they move to this Eden, they experience what is called Hedonic Adaptation and get used with palm trees, sunshine, ocean and get annoyed with the limitations of any earthly territory, from heavy traffic to ultra-expensive electricity on some islands, which also experience frequent outings and…devastating hurricanes.

This is not to say that Jacqui is the negative character in the film, even if she has chosen to become intimate with the friend of her husband and did not prove exceptional Social Intelligence when she requested restraining orders.
On the other hand, maybe she has a wondrous Emotional Intelligence, if we consider the involution of the husband, who gets crazy when his spouse walks out of the house, takes the child and then makes it difficult for him to see and take her whenever he wants, which he thinks is his right as parent.

Al Shaw does many crazy things, from taking all his clothes off in front of the new lodging of his spouse, after being denied entrance, to using his towing truck to take the whole door off the hinges when the same denial faces him.
However, he crosses all the red lines and becomes a criminal, apparently demented father when he decides to take his daughter away, using a gun to threaten Ray and his wife, throws the truck into the river, to confuse the investigating party following on his tracks and takes the girl to the middle of the woods.

This is where he thinks he will enjoy at least a few weeks with his child, even if it means she has suffered a trauma, was terrified when he took her using the shotgun and she is now in the wild, without her mother.

One may wonder what was in the minds of the writers of this motion picture, did they rally behind this antihero, tried only to tell us a story that is credible, or was it something else that lies beneath?
It looks real and this is also because of the nature of the main characters, who, apart from Jacqui are distinguishably unattractive, provoking some, if not most of the audience to puzzle over the reasons why Jacqui would like any of the two, the possible reason being that they are so remote and this may be one reason why she wants to live in Australia.

Things get worse, with the child getting sick in the forest and the father obliged to take her to civilized territory to get medicine, then kidnap one person, face the law, only to bring it all to some other challenging conclusions.
It is not clear why The New York Times has included this feature on its list of Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made:



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