F]
HY
j
|

REVIEWS

‘Ordinary
people’
honored

LONELY HEARTS An Australian film

Hughes and Norman Kaye. At local
theatres.

Lonely Hearts, one of the latest
releases from our Commonwealth cou--
sin, Australia, is a moving, realistic
production that gives us a humanistic
glimpse of the causes and consequences
of human loneliness in modern society.
It also contains a message for
Canadians. :

Peter Thompson (Norman Kaye) isa
few weeks short of his 50th birthday
when his mother, with whom he has
lived all his life, dies. That leaves Peter,
whose profession is piano tuning (with
a sideline job of entertaining at senior
citizens’ gatherings) to rattle around the
run-down family house and presuma-
bly conclude his bachelor’s life within
its gloomy interior. _

Peter’s self-perception, however, has
undergone some subtle changes since
his mother’s death. Following the fun-
eral we find him purchasing the services
of a lonely hearts club through which,
he is told, he will find his match. This
scene, and the following one in which
he is enticed into purchasing an expen-
sive replacement _hairpiece, speaks
volumes about the way certain enter-
prises exploit peoples’ fears and anxie-
ties to make a healthy profit. _

Peter meets his companion, Patricia
Curnow, (Wendy Hughes) a far
younger woman whose parents are still
very much alive and present, and there-
fore provide at least one reason why

Films

some people wind up withdrawn and
lonely.

Audiences have seen such types in
numerous films, but seldom have they
been given such depth and sympathy as
director Paul Cox and writer Cox and
John Clarke have accorded.

Cox’s lens reveals in Peter a subdued
but ultimately interesting man whose |
quirks include petty shoplifting and
occasional pranks such as pretending
to be blind for one customer, who is
subsequently startled to see him drive
off in his car. And the initial stark
impression of Patricia gives way to
reveal her inclination for self-education
and a latent acting talent.

A press kit quotes Cox as asking,
“Why can’t we be able to make films
about what we really are, and how we
feel?. ..So-called ‘ordinary people’ rarely
get a chance to see a movie that con- ,
cerns them.” :

The Netherlands-born Cox also
comments on the need for films that
give Australia a sense of identity. That
concern is mirrored in sentiment in
‘English-speaking Canada.

Unfortunately, we have instead
chronic underfunding of and threats to
eliminate our better institutions, such
as the National Film Board, and cur-
rently our role has been to churn out
B-grade movies for American audien-
ces. Lonely Hearts displays a positive
and in-depth view of humanity that
some Canadian filmmakers have
achieved, and of which we should see a
lot more.

— Dan Keeton

directed by Paul Cox. Starring Wendy .

TASS PHOTO — ALBERT PUSHKARYOV

The Soviet Union launched its Soyuz-10 mission Feb. 8, manned by flight commander Col. Leonid Kizim (centre) and flight engineer .
Vladimir Solovyov (left) and including Dr. Oleg Atkov, a cardiologist and specialist in space medicine research. The trio, seenhere during |
training at the Gagarin Space Centre, docked Feb. 9 with the orbiting space station Salyut-
experiments. The stay in space is expected to last several months,

7 where they are to carry out a number of
perhaps even exceeding the record set in 1982 by two other Soviets.

~ 4? __ Books

Moving tribute to Jara

VICTOR: AN UNFINISHED SONG By
Joan Jara. London, Jonathan Cape, 1983.
$12.95. Avail. at Co-op Books

As I stepped on to the plane at Pudahuel
Airport, Santiago, escorted by the British
consul, on 15 October, 1973, I was a person
with no identity. Whoever I had been —
dancer? choreographer? teacher? wife? — I
was no longer. I looked at my two small
daughters scrambling into their seats ahead of
me, both of them pale and subdued, not even
quarreling about who should have the window
seat, and I was only too aware that they
depended entirely on me now. Indeed, I
needed them to go on living. I knew that a part
of me was dead, had died with a man whose
body was now lying in a coffin, in a concrete
niche, high up on the back wall of the General
Cemetery of Santiago.

I had left the niche covered with a rough-

“hewn stone which said simply: VICTOR

JARA, 14 de Septiembre 1973.

The date was wrong. At the time there was
no way of knowing exactly which day my
husband had been murdered. I had left no
space for flowers. The usual little troughs in
front of the niches look bare and sad when
they are empty. I could not know that Victor’s
grave would never be without flowers, that
unknown people would go to any lengths to
climb up and tie tins and pots with bits of wire
and string in order to leave their offerings,
even though in doing so they risked arrest.

With those brief paragraphs, Joan Jara,
the British wife of martyred Chilean folk-
singer Victor Jara, begins what is one of the
most hauntingly beautiful — and vital —
of the many books written about the events
in Chile before and during the fascist coup
of 1973.

Victor, An Unfinished Song is many
things — autobiography, biography, a
narrative history, a love story. But above all,
it is a testament to Victor Jara who devoted
his life to uniting his songs and his art with
the struggles and aspirations of the Chilean
people, from the time in the 1950s when he
first joined a group inspired by Violetta
Parra, to his development of the Chilean
New Song Movement as the cultural

_ expression of the popular movement.

Throughout the text are excerpts from
Victor’s songs, put in the context of the
events and impressions which inspired
them. For anyone who has heard them

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 22, 1984

sung, they suddenly take on new meaning.

In her introduction, Joan Jara writes that
she “had to learn to speak, to tell the outside
world, about the suffering of so many
people. ..to do everything in my power to
allow Victor, through his music. ..to con-
tinue to work for the cause he had made his
own.”

In Victor, An Unfinished Song, she has
done that, eloquently, movingly, whether
she is describing the tumultuous days dur-
ing the Allende government, the wrenching
moment when she came across ‘Victor’s
body admist the thousands in the morgue,
or the haunting day when, during Pablo
Neruda’s funeral, hundreds of mourners
defiantly chanted Victor’s name along with
that of the great Chilean poet.

— Sean Griffin

Quarter century of change

changes in the electoral system and the —

CUBA AT 25 by Gil Green. New York,
International Publishers, 1983. $4.75.
Avail. at Co-op Books

Friends of Cuba would do well to com-
memorate the 25th anniversary of the
Cuban revolution by reading and circulat-
ing Gil Green’s new book Cuba at 25 — the
Continuing Revolution. It is chock full of
fascinating new data.

Green wrote his first book about
Cuba — Revolution, Cuban Style — after
trips in 1969 and 1970. Cuba at 25 is an
update, reviewing growth and changes, pos-
ing questions, honestly discussing problems.

He starts with Cuba’s economic situa-
tion, showing the all-out constant effort of
the U.S., over the last 23 years to starve
Cuba to death, listing the extreme measures
of economic warfare used against her.

Economic diversification, an early and
major goal, is well underway, so that sugar
does not have to carry the whole economy.
Now there are steel, metal, fishing, citrus
and various consumer goods industries. For
the latter, Green asked: how does Cuba
know what to produce, in what quantities
and whether production is to the people’s
needs and taste? For one thing, Cuba has a
national network of 10,000 families for test-
ing and sampling.

Chapter titles are descriptive: “Planning
as an art; cutting red tape,” including

VICTOR JARA. . .illustration from one of his
many record albums.

working of the new Cuban constitution,
“How people power works,” describing
how each level of the governmental stru~

ture relates back to the island’s 169 munick —

pal assemblies and why candidates rua
exclusively on their records, not on pf
grams or issues.

The subjects covered are as varied as they
are timely: “Union democracy;” “Is there 4
doctor on the block?” — detailing the

dramatic story of Cuba’s amazing progress —

in health care for all its people; “Facing uP

to Machismo”, the positive effect of the —
Family Code on husband-wife relations —

and the overall rights of women and
children. :

“Early love” is a brief but revealing dis-
cussion of the situation and problems
involved in teenage pregnancies, immature
marriages, sexual inequality and male
supremacy; the roots of the problems run
deep but they are consciously working on
them.

There are chapters on farming, on the
revolution in education, on the young
generation — including a discussion of
why so many thousands of young people
left Cuba in 1980 — and “The Communist
Party: of blue sky. and red fish,” on U.S.
crimes against Cuba including the use of
biological warfare.

Buy it, read it, pass it on.

— Vivian Raineri