MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘SWEET COUNTRY’: PAINFULLY FLAWED

Michael Cacoyannis’ “Sweet Country” (Monica 4-Plex), like Costa-Gavras’ “Missing,” is set in Chile, in the turbulent aftermath of the overthrow of Salvadore Allende in 1973. And, like Costa-Gavras, Cacoyannis tells things from a mostly American viewpoint, trying for a passionate indictment of political repression.

It’s a sympathetic, brave film--but also painfully flawed. Based on a novel by Caroline Richards, it paints a world where the bourgeois, liberal protagonists--American and Chilean--are cast into a nightmare, where no one is innocent, no one is safe.

The story is long, dense and complicated, structured by the memories of a woman, Anna (Jane Alexander), re-meeting a reporter, Paul (Franco Nero), whom she’s long suspected of treachery. The flashback--set 10 years earlier, immediately before and after Allende’s overthrow, focuses on a tragic chain of events involving a wealthy, progressive Chilean family thrust into the maelstrom.

Cacoyannis, like Costa-Gavras, is Greek-born. It’s obvious they both draw strong parallels between the fate of Allende and the Lambrakis assassination and anti-Papeandreaou coup in Greece. Yet, though Cacoyannis keeps this complex story lucid, something seems to have defeated him. This is the first film he’s made in 10 years, and it’s a major disappointment.

“Sweet Country” not only lacks the explosive tension of “Missing,” but it mostly lacks Cacoyannis’ own strengths: his incandescent staging, the impassioned histrionics of his casts and those vigorous outdoor scenes, slashed with violent sunlight. Much of “Sweet Country” transpires indoors--in muted, tasteful rooms where the outbursts or gesticulations seem strangely out of place.

The movie is somewhat static and overloaded--and, despite an excellent cast, almost all the performances are stilted. Oddly, “Sweet Country,” set in 1973, seems less contemporary, less visually and dramatically alive, than Cacoyannis’ “Electra” and “Iphigenia,” set in the Greek classical era.

Cacoyannis’ dialogue here is stiff and labored and the casting has the same bizarre multinationalism as an old Hollywood “prestige” adaptation--like Sam Wood’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” where Spanish guerrillas were impersonated by, among others, a Swede, two Russians, a Pole, a Maltese and a Greek. Here, we’re shown a “Chilean” family, the Arayas, composed of a French father, Jean-Pierre Aumont; a Greek mother, Irene Papas; and two daughters, Eva and Monica, played by American Joanna Pettet and French-Canadian Carol Laure. The sisters, in turn, are persecuted by Juan, a Chilean peasant-soldier played by Randy Quaid--a Texan with a Greek sid1701538147Alexander and John Cullum--and they give two of the film’s more comfortable, and best, performances.But, to confuse things futher, the presumed French-

Canadian traitor is played by Franco Nero, from Parma.

All of them, whether ersatz Chilean or American, speak the same labored,formalized, over-enunciated dialogue, adapted from Richard’s novel byr Cacoyannis-much of which sounds like a foreign language translation.