Paradise Road
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| Paradise Road | |
|---|---|
 Original film poster |
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| Directed by | Bruce Beresford |
| Produced by | Greg Coote Sue Milliken |
| Written by | Bruce Beresford David Giles (story) Martin Meader Betty Jeffrey (diaries) |
| Starring | Glenn Close Frances McDormand Pauline Collins Cate Blanchett Jennifer Ehle Julianna Margulies Elizabeth Spriggs |
| Music by | Ross Edwards |
| Cinematography | Peter James |
| Editing by | Tim Wellburn |
| Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures Twentieth Century-Fox |
| Release date(s) |  11 April 1997 5 June 1997 |
| Running time | 122 min |
| Country | USA/ Australia |
| Language | English Japanese Dutch Chinese Malay |
| IMDb profile | |
Paradise Road is a 1997 film which tells the story of a group of women who are imprisoned in Sumatra during World War II. It is directed by Bruce Beresford and stars Glenn Close as beatific Adrienne Pargiter, Frances McDormand as the brash Dr. Verstak, Pauline Collins as missionary Margaret Drummond, Julianna Margulies as American socialite Topsy Merritt, Jennifer Ehle as British doyenne and model Rosemary Leighton Jones, Cate Blanchett and Elizabeth Spriggs as dowager Imogene Roberts.
The film examines and explores how, in times of adverse danger and suffering, people have the capacity to make it through by means of moral support and strength. The film highlights the atrocities of war. One example of this is the woman doused in petrol, then set alight. The film also effectively explores the control of the Sumatran society and the disregard for the sanctity of Red Cross services.
The story is based on the testimonies of Helen Colijn and Betty Jeffrey written in their books Song of Survival et White Coolies.
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[edit] Synopsis
When the Japanese over-run Singapore in 1942 many women and children end up in prison camp. Although of different ages, nationalities and backgrounds, a bond grows up as they face the lack of food and medicine and the brutal behaviour of their captors. They even start organizing a voice orchestra using remembered musical scores painstakingly written out again.
[edit] Production notes
The film was shot in Marrickville, New South Wales, and Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia; Penang, Malaysia; and Singapore.
For the music used in the film, director Bruce Beresford interviewed real-life participants in similar POW musical groups. Some provided, from memory, sheet music of the pieces they performed.
Singapore falls to the Japanese in 1942 and the women and children are put on boats to be shipped to safety. Japanese fighters, however, sink one boat and those on board must swim for their lives. Landing on the Japanese controlled island of Sumatra, the women, including Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), a British graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, Susan Macarthy (Cate Blanchett), an Australian nursing student, Topsy Merrit (Julianna Margulies), a pessimistic American, and "Margaret" Drummond (Pauline Collins), a sweet missionary, are captured and imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp. Suffering from cruel and inhumane treatment, tropical diseases and the uncertainty of their future, the women band together for moral support. Others, including Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand) and Sister Wilhelminia (Johanna Ter Steege) do what they can to tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the group. As the years pass, the women, led by Adrienne, form a "vocal orchestra" that not only softens the guards' demeanor, but also lifts the women's spirits as it provides a purpose in their lives.[1]
Paradise Road announces itself in large print to be "based on a true story". The film is said to be centred on a group of women who are on a ship fleeing Singapore. Having survived the bombing and sinking of the ship they think that "the worst is over", but they find that the tough times are in the prison camp, and that is when they face their harshest test of survival. However, when introducing viewers to setting and characters, and getting the characters into a prison camp, Paradise Road makes an obvious change from true incidents.
According to the Australian War Memorial website,[2] there were nearly 100 people, including children and wounded, on the beach after abandoning ship. An officer from the Vyner Brooke explained that as they had no food, no help for the injured and no chance of escape, they should give themselves up to the Japanese. He agreed to walk to Muntok, a town on the north-west of the island, and contact the Japanese. While he was away Matron Irene Drummond, the most senior of the Australian nurses, suggested that the civilian women and children should start off walking towards Muntok. At mid-morning the ship’s officer returned with about twenty Japanese soldiers. Having separated the men from the women prisoners, the Japanese divided the men into two groups, and marched them along the beach and behind a headland. The nurses heard a quick succession of shots before the Japanese soldiers came back, sat down in front of the women and cleaned their bayonets and rifles. A Japanese officer, smaller and more "nattily" dressed than his men, told the women to walk into the water. A couple of soldiers shoved those who were slow to respond. Twenty-two nurses and one civilian woman walked into the waves, leaving ten or twelve stretcher cases on the beach. When the women were up to their waists in water the Japanese started firing up and down the line with a machine gun. They swept up and down the line and the girls fell one after the other.
Several factors probably stopped the writers of Paradise Road from including the shooting on the beach. It occurs so early in the sequence of events and is so powerful in its impact that it would be likely to make everything that follows anticlimactic. The film-makers having chosen to make the voice orchestra, the triumph of human accomplishment and the beauty of sound over constraint and squalor, central to the film, then it becomes all the more important for the film to make an early shift from the violent action of the escape from Singapore and the sinking of the ship to the deprivations of the prison camp. One more scene of even greater violence would have made it impossible to change the style and mood of the film.[citation needed]
In Paradise Road, the young and attractive women are taken off to a splendid Dutch colonial home occupied by Japanese officers to be comfort women. It is 1943, and the women have already suffered prolonged deprivation. The Japanese interpreter tentatively puts an invitation to them as they stand nervously in a clean room looking at a table piled with rich food. In effect, he asks them to leave the squalor, starvation, disease and fear of death in the internment camp for the food, soap, hot water, satin sheets and hope of life in the officers’ club. There is, of course, a cost for making the change: the women who live in the club will have to give sexual pleasure to the Japanese. And there is an added moral and practical complication. Adrienne Pargiter wants some of the women for the camp’s voice orchestra. If they go to work in the officers’ club they will be giving up their own place in the orchestra and reducing the power of the orchestra to transform momentarily the camp for those who remain its prisoners. As Pargiter says to one waverer, Topsy Merritt, if you go I will be an alto short. Those who exchange the receipt of some sensual pleasures for the provision of other sensual pleasures are told that they are weakening the orchestra, and so weakening all women in the camp. Topsy agrees to "starve and sing", but many other women go to live in the Japanese officers’ club.
The incident on which the film scene is based took place soon after capture, in March 1942. The orchestra was not formed until several months later and thus could not have been a factor in the decisions made by the women propositioned for the club.
