Fred Schepisi

Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep) is a young woman who, during World War II, joins the provincial French Resistance as an undercover British agent. The highlight of her time in France is a night of passion with another agent, codenamed Lazar (Sam Neill), who briefly passes through her sector.

As she struggles to adjust to life in Britain after the war and a series of unsatisfying conventional jobs, Susan looks back with growing nostalgia to her wartime experiences. Her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and self-destructive, and even the support of her diplomat husband (Charles Dance) and a close friend (Tracey Ullman) fail to prevent her slow unravelling.Read More »

Quote:
One of the wonders that a good movie can sometimes achieve is to take us entirely outside the framework of the society to which it will eventually be shown. Fred Schepisi’s “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” an Australian film about a half-aborigine who goes on a savage murder spree against whites, is a movie like that. Its story is told entirely in the moral terms of the raw Australian outback of about 1900, and the racial attitudes in the movie are firmly drawn from that period.Read More »