John Hillcoat – To Have and to Hold (1996)

Murder, madness and delirious sexual jealousy in Papua New Guinea. The Proposition director John Hillcoat’s lost 1996 psychodrama, featuring a soundtrack by Nick Cave and Scott Walker

Synopsis
“Jack (Karyo) is a Parisian living in Papua New Guinea, where he runs a ramshackle outdoor cinema. Two years ago his wife Rose (Finsterer) died in mysterious circumstances. Now he’s self-medicated with booze and dope and obsessed with the memory of his wife, whose flickering, drunken image he revisits nightly on the TV screens in his rickety editing suite.

On a trip to Melbourne to stock up on films for his cinema, Jack encounters writer Kate (Griffiths), and immediately he’s in love. Jack persuades Kate to join him in Papua New Guinea, but the past – and the clues to his wife’s death – remain present in the island’s two other whites: sleazy bar owner Sal (Jacobs), and whiskey-drenched missionary Stevie (Field), who ended up not converting but being converted by the pantheistic Papuans.

The narrative is fractured, reality shifts, and memories rear up out of Jack’s fevered subconscious as he teeters on sanity’s brink. Yet this is also a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama about enduring – in both senses – love. Writer Gene Conkie scripted Hillcoat’s Civil Dead, and To Have And To Hold displays that first film’s fascination with men at the very edge of their capacity to cope. What it lacks, and this probably accounts for the film’s failure to receive a proper theatrical release in 1996, is the sense of purpose that drives Hillcoat’s other films, or their harsh moral tone.

Jack drifts into a booze-fuelled nightmare of his own creation, the past replayed on his own video equipment, but the cinematic references – to The Harder They Come, among others – reflect a fascination with film as a form, rather than with the reality which film seeks to convey, and that same schematic approach is evident throughout the film’s second half.

Cave and Bargeld’s soundtrack is like Ennio Morricone conducting Popol Vuh; the sense of delirium, delusion, isolation and insanity is persistently intriguing; Tchéky Karyo and Rachel Griffiths sweat it out convincingly in the wetly oppressive jungle. But despite the allure of madness and whiskey in exotic climes, whatever it is that To Have And To Hold is grasping towards remains tantalisingly out of reach.”

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https://nitro.download/view/19199631D11FD6D/To_Have_And_To_Hold_(John_Hillcoat).avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None