Movie Reviews : ‘Paradise’ Echoes Noyce’s Softer, Gentler Touch

Hard on the heels of Phillip Noyce’s smashing new sea-and-sex chase thriller “Dead Calm” comes a much different movie, one which Noyce shot several years ago: “Echoes of Paradise” (Fine Arts).

In “Calm,” Noyce shows that he knows how to make a smoking melodrama. In “Echoes of Paradise,” he’s trying something softer, gentler: a psychological love story about an Australian mother and wife (Wendy Hughes) who leaves her would-be politician husband after discovering his incessant infidelities and takes up with a Balinese dancer (John Lone) in a Thai tourist paradise.

Trying to cauterize her own pain and humiliation, Hughes’ Maria McAvoy drifts into a languorous, little alternative community: with the homosexual hotel-owner, Terry (Rod Mullinar) and his seductive and ambiguously charming guest, Raka (Lone). As she falls, or slides, into an extramarital affair, Maria has the self-conscious stance of an uncertain actress, edging into a bewildering role. Raka and Terry, theatrical to the core, manipulate their performances more adroitly: Raka with a silken, lazy ease; Terry more flamboyantly, with witty lines and troubled eyes.

Do some directors keep making the same film, in various guises? Both of Noyce’s recent films are about triangles, about a husband and wife kept physically apart after a crisis in their marriage, and with a third male character--strange, sexually aggressive, possibly with a pathological edge--coming in to roil the waters and to keep them apart.

“Dead Calm” was like “Knife in the Water” with an electric chainsaw; it was all swift mechanics, with a technical gleam that burned your eyes. “Echoes of Paradise,” written and executive-produced by Noyce’s wife, Jan Sharp, digs deeper into its characters. It keeps its edges cloaked in mist, the sunlight dropped and filtered in a latticework of Asian shadows, the love scenes unfolding serenely, by candlelight. Both lovers are on vacation, Raka on an extended retirement from the stage, and Noyce and Sharp give us a sense of what happens when ordinary time hits a stop.

It’s a subtle film that doesn’t make any obvious errors. And it has two splendid, all but faultless, leading performances--by Wendy Hughes and John Lone. They mesh seamlessly, quietly reversing our usual conceptions of male-female movie personas. Despite her soft, wounded expression, Hughes’ acting has the keener edge, the more aggressive, searching attack, while Lone, in a role that predated “The Last Emperor,” gives his Raka more rounded, voluptuous contours, a honeyed smile, eyes like flaming liqueur.

But, somehow it doesn’t go far enough, doesn’t open up enough possibilities. Like the wife, this movie is somewhat trapped; it has lovely moments, but it’s restrained, hemmed in--and the cinematography, by Peter James, is a disappointment.

Fuzzy and muted and soft, it suggests Maria’s repressed home life when she’s in Australia, but, in Thailand, it doesn’t change. It doesn’t release you into the hot exoticism of her new surroundings, or suggest, even subliminally, the danger, glamour or flukey romance that might be sucking her in.

Part of what the film suggests is that interludes are dangerous, that marriage is a serious affair, that the world outside can never be avoided. But “Echoes of Paradise” (MPAA rated R, for sex and language) also tries for the poetics of the unplanned impulse. It’s a shame that more of its moments aren’t up to Hughes’ and Lone’s best. You’re left at the end with two finely delineated, perfectly etched performances and a mood that stays languorous, pensive, drifting. The paradise vanishes and only the echoes remain.