The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

THE GUARDIAN Thursday November 28 1991 The trail blazer 28 REVIEWSCREEN The Indian Runner and Proof, two films by first-time directors, head the new movies reviewed by Derek Malcolm sea etc, IS), and the fact that this is also a first feature; written by its young director, makes it all the more commendable. The film is basically a psychological thriller about a blind photographer (Hugo Weaving) whose pictures are a kind of proof of the world he cannot see. He is repressed and embittered, given to knocking over wine glasses in restaurants when he can't get service and treating those who look after him in roughly the same manner. His lovelorn housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), having been comprehensively spurned, tries an affair with the younger man (Russell Crowe) who has been engaged to describe the photographs he takes. Thus is the manipulator manipulated.

Moorhouse's film, unlike HOUGH Sean Perm's Toe uuuan winner (Cannon, Tottenham Court Road, IS) is about two brothers it is basically a giant self-examination by the first-time director, who also wrote the screenplay. It is fairly cliched in conception but no one could say it wasn a highly promising debut. The brothers live in a small Nebraskan town, circa 1968. One (Viggo Mortensen) has come home with a pregnant girlfriend (Patricia Arquette) and large chips on both shoulders after spells in Vietnam and prison. He is, in fact, on the edge of breakdown.

The other (David Morse) is the local policeman, happily married to Valeria Golino. He feels responsible for his brother since neither of his parents (Sandy Dennis and Charles Branson) is capable of giving him much support in his efforts. What actually happens is generally predictable, degenerating into violence as the brothers test each other to the full. But the way the story is expressed is more original, since Perm lingers long enough on his scenes of rural heartland life to get more out of them than would be vouchsafed by your average American family saga. Often sequences which should logically be shorter profitably expand on the theme of corporate rather than individual disillusionment Above all, Penn also gets tense and satisfying performances from his cast, who include Dennis Hopper as the local barman.

How often, for instance, has Bronson been -asked for this kind of bleak cameo? If The Indian Runner, taking its cue from Bruce Spring- steen's Highway Patrolman, is hardly ground-breaking, ihe sensitivity of its making is such that Penn's decision to act 'only when he can't direct makes some sort of sense. The most mature film of the week is Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof (Camden Plaza and Chel Called to the bar Dennis Hopper dispenses some advice with the Southern Comfort to Viggo Mortensen in The Indian Runner, the highly promising debut by Sean Penn, director would simply have relaxed and Penn (which is over two hours) is economic, toughly intelligent and not afraid to be funny as well as serious about its central character's traumas. She treats him as a man rather than a case history and finds time also for an intriguing subtext on the general theme of Antonioni's Blow-Up. The result is a film you can take several different ways but is, at its strongest, a triangular study of human relationships which dares to suggest that, even with his sight restored, this blind man might not be able to see. Mike Newell's Enchanted April (Curzon West End, 15) has been slightly cut since opening the London Festival and now takes less time to launch into its plot about four Edwardian ladies who take time off from men and their restricted London lives to holiday ina Tuscan villa.

Taken from Elizabeth Von Arnim's gently pre-feminist novel, the film relies heavily on its performances and the kind of persuasive period atmosphere so often achieved in otherwise not particularly cinematic British films. But one should not underrate the acting of Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Polly Walker and especially of Joan Plowright, whose cameo as the elderly gorgon persuaded to come with the younger refugees is a total joy (and I don't care whether.she do this kind of part standing on her head or not). The men too Jim Broad-bent Alfred M6Bna and Michael Kitchen are more than sufficient, so that this Peter Barnes adaptation becomes exactly what it is supposed to be a very decent jointed tale of a remote community in Snowdonia in (seemingly) the 1930s. It is an uncosy place, where child molestation seems to be a prevalent pastime, conjugal affection is apt to involve each party trying to cut the other's throat, and news of an uncle having hanged himself in the outhouse is retailed as scarcely more than an aside. The viewpoint is mainly that of an unfortunate small boy caught in the crossfire between poverty and superstition, but the lurches between realism and a Kind of gothic fantasy are not much help in unifying the rambling narrative.

The locale is deployed to some effect, and stray touches of humour and sentiment, leaven the gloom. But by the time the doubly morbid climax has been reached, the spectator is liable to be wondering what the Welsh might be for Cold Comfort Farm. At the press screening of product of the chintzier school of British film-making which only lacks a harder-hitting focal point to seem commendably complete in itself. Blake Edwards' Switch (Odeon West End, 15) has a notorious womaniser (Perry King) drowned by three of his conquests but sent back from purgatory with the body of a woman (Ellen Barkin) to redeem himself. This is California, so you almost believe it might happen.

The familiar Edwards sense of irony is often apparent but with little of the flair of VictorVictoria, and the piece relies, over-neaviiy on a doughty and skilful performance from Barkin staggering almtm high heels and ma noeuvring her too-tight UrtfaS a man in a woman's body. The trouble is that, since the character King plays loves himself so thoroughly, it is difficult to beat back the thought that he clanks with metal-protected war wounds and whose brain seems as if the surgeons left several assorted swabs in it This is a performance of such comic panache that even the unfunny jokes can't spoil it The rest is very curate's eggy indeed, like an Americanised Monty Python without the proper personnel. Hiroaki Yoshida's Iron Maze (Cannon Haymarket etc, 15), is an American-Japanese co-production which sounds promising but delivers very little. It is about a young Japanese businessman, married to an American wife, who is badly beaten up as he visits the abandoned Pennsylvanian steel null which.once forged the weapons used against his country but is now to become an amusement park under his ownership. Unfortunately this thriller-cum-emotional examination of present-day resentments fails on both scores.

It is horribly enjoyed himself as the proud possessor of Barkin's body. Equally manic as a whole, Hot Shots (Odeon, Leicester Square, 12) looks like repeating at least part of the success of The Naked Gun 1 'A. But this time there's no Leslie Neilsen to sustain it, the director is Jim Abrahams and the parody of Top Gun misses as many targets as it hits. It is, however, short, sharp and engagingly unashamed of its bad jokes. It just passes them by and tries again.

Charlie Sheen plays Little Fluffy Bunnies, an ex-fighter pilot persuaded back from his stint on a reservation to win Operation Sleepy Weazel for the Navy. It is a marginally more risible part than his CIA operative in Navy Seals. The man who comes out of the film a long way ahead of everyone else is Lloyd Bridges as the vet eran commander whose body Between mundane jobs for Australian TV a young film-maker planned her big movie. Against the odds it hit the commercial and critical jackpot. Derek Malcolm on Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof When love is really blind forget it was the Victorian and National Film Commissions who financed me.

Without that support, I might have had much more trouble getting Proof under way. They sort of adopted it once they had read the Her next film is a thriller called Snake In The Grass and she's also collaborating with her husband, Paul Hogan, on a black comedy called Rowena's Wedding. She hopes the thriller will be just as psychologically tense as Proof. "I guess I'm taking as my model Roeg's Don't Look Now. It won't be like that film, of course you couldn't possibly copy it But the fact that it's a slow and more than a little pretentious.

Yoshida's plot which has Jeff Fahey's unemployed steel-worker falling lugubriously for the stricken businessman's wife (Bridget Fonda) and Walsh as the local police chief who does not seem to be trying very hard to find the culprit, looks like Rashomon on ice. Hiroaki Murakami as the businessman doesn't seem to know quite what his lines mean. The film, in fact, looks good but sounds awful, like one of those familiar Euro-puddings transferred across the Atlantic and high and dry between two cultures. Tim Pulleine odds: "What pries (in Welsh, with English subtitles) a little way into Endaf Emlyn's One Full Moon (National Film Theatre). It is a question the audience may have cause to echo more than once during this strange, dis were very excited at first and said it's about time something different was made.

Then came the memos: I'm sorry, Jocelyn, but at the last moment we thought we ought to change it a bit'. I'd just say fine, fine, and let them get on with it But with the film it was different I did exactly what wanted. And must say I've had no criticism from the blind at all. Those who have gone along to see it sitting next to sighted friends who describe everything going on, have actually liked it a lot. "But it's not just about being blind, of course, though it's one of my greatest fears as a filmmaker.

It's a film about relationships we all want proof that others can be trusted and that they love you as much as they say they do. "The leading character is a repressed human being like a lot of Australian men, I might add and the film's about what that does to you as much as the fact that he's Asked why there were so many women directors coming to the fore in Australia (Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Ann Turner and now herself), Moorhouse says it wasn't always that way, that Australian society is still pretty macho but that the industry couldn't deny the successes of Armstrong (My Brilliant Career) and Campion (Sweetie, Angel At My Table) and simply decided to back talent "They'd probably rather we were men, but there you "The other thing is that the writer-director seems to be coming back all over the world and it just happened that a lot of us wanted to be just that But don't photographer (Huro Weaving). Omen IV The Awakening (general release), vocal disappointment greeted the discovery that the film merited only a 15 certificate. Certainly there is nothing very frightening, though much that is conspicuously silly, in this cheapjack semi-remake of the original Omen movie, with the scene, moved to the US and the devil's progeny made female for a change. Things brighten up a bit with the intervention of one of those inevitably seedy gumshoes, hired by the child's suspicious mother.

But after his death from supernatural causes, the picture runs slowly downhill toward a gabbled and garbled explanation of the conspiracy. It is hard to imagine that even devotees of this sort of schlock: will find much to chortle at here. The only genuinely spine-chilling touch is that the ending leaves the way open for yet another sequel. very scary but very emotional film too gives one the challenge. "I want to try and get both into a thriller, and maybe bring my femaleness into play too, by exploring the forces of nurturing not sweetness and light and apple pie but getting pretty heavy about it.

"What happens.for instance, when a woman goes against nature and denies the mother in herself? What if she said: I don't want to be a woman. I don't like it. Dangerous territory, I know, and goodness knows what it could unleash. But I like taking risks. Films which don't aren't often worth looking at, are they?" Ian CtirlstK SKJKT AND SOUND, Will CAMDEN PLAZA CAMDEN TOWN 071.4032443 PROGS 2M 4.43 6.50 9.00 COUKT RD 071-MA6IU CHR1STMA "ASTONISHING, POWERFUL BEFORE LOVE COMES TRUST taw- ANYONE who can make a film for just over a million dollars these days must be lucky, and to sell it all over the world must be proof of talent But to make one with a central character who is a twisted and repressed bund photographer preying both on the woman who loves him and the young man who helps him in his work takes considerable courage as well.

Jocelyn Moorhouse, the young Australian director of Proof which opens in London tomorrow, clearly has both qualities. A graduate of the Australian Film and Television School, she spent several years honing the script in between more mundane television commitments and then shot the film without compromise as a complex and slightly bizarre study of human relationships. The result was an "art movie" that not only broke box-office records and won awards in Australia but was a substantial triumph for the director at Cannes and later Festivals. "If I'd been British and made Proof in Britain, I guess everyone would have called it a telly film. But there's no way it could have been a television film in Australia t's too oddball.

People would just hear the word "blind" and assume that it was going to be another patronising Hollywood-type piece about blind people being noble. Then when they saw the script and found out that this one is a bastard they would think too many people would be offended. No, they wouldn't have made it But they'll buy it now, of course." "Every time I've tried to do anything daring on telly, they Man in the middle the blind I Starring Rowan Asians on as Ebenezer Blackadder wish Tony Robinson as Baldrick. Dickens1 classic tale of kindness, truth and virtue completely mucked up and ruined by having a member of the Blackadder family involved. OUT NOW ON BBC VIDEO Sffll3IiGSI STARTS TOMORROW CHELSsArCINsMA I 206 KING'S ROAD 071.351 3743 I PR04S 248 4.45 8.50 9.00 GAMMON TOTTtNHAM bis housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), and her lover (Russell Crowe).