MOVIES : Consider the Record...

Director Gillian Armstrong’s “The Last Days of Chez Nous” is an oddly unsettling movie for one simple reason: It is a brutally unromanticized love story. All the players in this ill-fated triangle of intimacy are shown with warts-and-all honesty. Though Armstrong is known, much to her dismay, as a feminist director, the women characters in “Chez Nous” are as flawed and fatally human as the men. In fact, all the characters in the film seem to live in a state of bewilderment.

On the surface, “Chez Nous,” which stars Lisa Harrow, Kerry Fox and Bruno Ganz, chronicles the dissolution of a marriage. On a deeper level, however, it’s an exploration of the aftermath of feminism. The women in “Chez Nous” are discovering that the rejection of obsolete and constricting female roles comes with an emotional price tag, while the men are struggling to reconcile traditional ideas about masculinity with the newly empowered woman.

“This is a film about how the rules have changed and how we’re still trying to work things out in the ‘90s,” says Armstrong, whose debut film of 1979, “My Brilliant Career,” garnered international critical acclaim. “Chez Nous” premiered last February at the Berlin Film Festival and is currently playing at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 and Monica.

“It’s now not uncommon for there to be marriages where the woman is more successful and has more money, “ Armstrong says. “The feminist movement was very strong in Australia and brought about a lot of change, and many men are lost as to how to deal with the new modern relationships.”

So, despite her protestation to the contrary, “Chez Nous” is in a sense a feminist film. About that, Armstrong sighs and says, “This issue always comes up in things that are written about me, and as you can tell, I’m getting a bit sick of it. To set the record straight, yes, I consider myself a feminist person, but I consider myself an artist as a filmmaker, and like all male directors, I’m a selfish, egotistical artist in my work. Women will never have true freedom as artists until people stop talking about the gender issues in their work, and it’s real ghettoized thinking to assume that any woman who makes films about women is a feminist.”

Armstrong, 41, is briefly in Los Angeles before returning home to Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her companion of 20 years and their two daughters, ages 4 and 7. Stylishly dressed in tailored clothing, her straight blond hair pulled back in a headband, she looks every inch the modern young career woman. You wouldn’t guess to look at her that Armstrong is a staunchly independent artist of quirky tastes, who thumbed her nose at Hollywood when it came calling after the success of her first film. “I have no interest in making films just to make money,” says the director, who made “Chez Nous” for $2.5 million. “And that makes it easier for me to wait for the ones I really want to do.”

Armstrong decided to make “Chez Nous,” which was shot in eight weeks on location in Sydney in the summer of 1991, because of the script by Helen Garner. “It’s a beautifully crafted script and I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else directing it,” she says.

The script was also what attracted New Zealand-born actress Kerry Fox, whose critically acclaimed performance in the Jane Campion film “Angel at My Table” established her as a gifted young actress. “It was an unusually humane piece of writing and was filled with characters I’d never seen in a film before,” Fox says. “My character in particular was a very true-to-life portrayal of a type of person I’ve often encountered--young people who desire to be something and do something but don’t really know what direction to go in. The challenge for me in playing this character was to make her extreme behavior understandable and to make her blameless in her own way.”

London-based actress Lisa Harrow also loved the script, but it was the chance to work with Armstrong that brought her on board. “I’ve always loved Gillian’s work because she gets really interesting performances out of actors, and now having worked with her my respect for her has only grown,” says Harrow, who was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1969-71 and has since appeared in several BBC productions. “She casts with meticulous care--in a sense, half her work as a director is done at that stage--then on the set she illuminates the text with utter sureness and delicacy.”

It was Armstrong’s forceful personality that recruited Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, best known for his work in Wim Wenders’ films “The American Friend” and “Wings of Desire.” Ganz tested for the part of J. P. but felt he was wrong for it because the character is French. Armstrong, however, wouldn’t take no for an answer. “When we met Bruno we felt that even though he isn’t French, he was J. P.--it was one of those rare moments in casting,” says Armstrong, adding that it took a bit of talking to get Ganz to see things her way. Ganz still felt unsure, however, and did extensive preparation for the role that included spending a good deal of time with members of the French community in Sydney.

By all accounts, the “Chez Nous” shoot was a difficult one, as the story unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a small house where cast and crew sweltered in temperatures that frequently soared above 100 degrees. Armstrong, however, didn’t mind the discomfort because she was thrilled to be making a film on her own terms and her home turf after having survived an ugly skirmish in Hollywood.

“In 1992 I made this film for Pathe MGM called ‘Fires Within,’ which I hope never comes out,” she says, wincing at the memory. “I’ve always had final cut of the films I’ve made in Australia, but this one was wrestled out of my hands and recut by the studios. My mistake was previewing the film too early, but I naively thought we were working as a team and had this idea of ‘let’s see what we have so far and sort out what we should do.’ That threw everyone into a state of panic and opened the film up to committee reworking.

“It was the most painful experience of my entire life,” she continues, “and it made me extremely leery of dealing with the Hollywood industry again. It was a valuable lesson, though, in that it taught me that the studios here are essentially old boys’ clubs. That’s probably changing gradually--hopefully some of them will move along into retirement homes,” she says with a laugh.

Armstrong lived in Beverly Hills while she was shooting “Fires Within.” “I must say it’s a very rarefied, special sort of life one leads here, and it was lovely,” she says of her time in Los Angeles, “but I was homesick for Sydney. Life’s much simpler there.”

Born in Sydney, the second in a family of three children, Armstrong was raised in Melbourne, where her father worked in real estate and her mother taught school. “It was a normal, middle-class upbringing and when I was a kid I was a real bookworm, not a movie nut,” she recalls. “Then in my final year of primary school I got involved with writing and putting on plays at school and the teacher told my mother I had a talent in that area. So, when I was 11 my mother got me involved with some local drama groups where I helped paint the scenery.

“At the time I dreamed of being an actress,” she continues, “but my best friend liked acting too and was much better at it than I, so I thought maybe I could do the sets. I enrolled at an art school where the only place you could study costume and theater design was in the film department and that’s how it began. I started seeing all the classics--by Welles, Fellini, Bergman, De Sica--and I was smitten.”

In 1973 Armstrong made her first film, a 10-minute short titled “One Hundred a Day,” about a young woman getting an illegal abortion in the 1930s. Two years later she directed the television documentary “Smokes and Lollies,” the first in an ongoing series chronicling the changing lives of three Adelaide girls. She checked in with the trio again in 1980 and 1988, and plans to do a fourth film in the series sometime in the next four years. This project--which she refers to as a “longitudinal study”--is the work she’s best known for in her homeland. Of its similarity to British director Michael Apted’s “Up” series, which preceded hers, she laughs and says, “Yes, they are similar--he must’ve copied me.”

Armstrong’s last attempt at writing her own material came in 1976 with the short film “The Singer and the Dancer.” Despite the fact that the film won the award for the best short film from the Australian Film Institute, Armstrong decided at this point that she wasn’t a writer. “It’s a special talent that I deeply respect and a great gift I don’t think I have,” she says.

Three years later “My Brilliant Career” was released and Armstrong’s career kicked into high gear. The story of a headstrong young woman determined to make her own way as a writer in turn-of-the-century Australia, the film achieved a level of international success that Armstrong recalls was “a total surprise. My modest dream was that it would sort of succeed in Australia so it was a great shock when Hollywood came calling; that was something I’d never thought about in my entire life.

“It was wonderful to come here and see all the things that are part of cinema history, but I never saw myself as part of the industry here and didn’t even want to read the scripts that were offered me. I realized I’d only done one film, how hard it was to make that film, and how important the team was that I’d made the film with. I was still learning and didn’t want to come and work with strangers in a strange culture. I felt I should go home and make another film with people that I knew.”

Which is exactly what she did. After completing two more documentaries (one about Tasmanian wood craftsmen, the other about potter Harold Hughan), she released her second feature, “Starstruck,” a New Wave musical featuring a cast of unknowns. The film didn’t sit too well with the critics, but Armstrong remembers it fondly nonetheless. “I was very pleased with ‘Starstruck’ and would love to make another musical,” she says. “It’s a happy way of working, having music going all day, and I loved working with dancers. We were all sort of high and happy making that film.”

After the completion of documentaries on glass-blowing and collective attitudes toward beauty in 1983, Armstrong finally capitulated the following year and came to America to make a film. “Mrs. Soffel,” a period love story starring Diane Keaton, Matthew Modine and Mel Gibson, was plagued by production problems but garnered respectable reviews.

Next up for Armstrong was a complete change of pace--a 1986 HBO special on Bob Dylan titled “Hard to Handle.” “I have two moments with Bob that I really treasure,” says Armstrong of the making of the film, which follows Dylan for a spell along the endless concert trail he’s been on for the last few years. “We met for lunch once at a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard that turned out to be closed, so we headed for one across the road. As we crossed Sunset the waters parted--traffic literally stopped! I felt like I was crossing Sunset with Jesus. Another time he dropped me off at my hotel in his limo and got out and kissed me goodby in front of everybody. I was very pleased about that.”

The following year Armstrong returned to Australia and completed her fourth feature, “High Tide.” Released in 1987 and starring Judy Davis, the film was an examination of mother-daughter relationships--a subject Armstrong says she’s just about exhausted for herself. “I think I’ve said all I have to say about that, and I don’t imagine I’ll be making another film about women struggling for independence for a while. I’ve explored both of those themes pretty thoroughly.”

As to what she does plan to do next, she has several ideas in the works and is determined to be in production on one of them by this summer. Her projects in development include a comedy with Tracey Ullman, a psychological drama in which actress Glenn Close has expressed an interest, and an adaptation of “Oscar and Lucinda,” Peter Carey’s epic novel about fate and gambling set in the late 1800s. Armstrong’s longtime friend Judy Davis has committed to a role in the Carey project, which Armstrong is happy to report would be made in Australia. She now knows without a shadow of a doubt that that’s where she works best.