The Cars that Ate Paris

#13 in my ranking of Peter Weir’s filmography.

This is actually the second time I’ve seen Peter Weir’s first full length feature film, and I’m as confused as ever. Much like I felt there were political aspects of his first film Homesdale that I didn’t grasp because they seemed to have been made for a very specific audience, I feel the same way about The Cars that Ate Paris. This was one of the first, if not the first, Australian movie about murderous cars that led to movies like Mad Max almost a decade later, and it’s hard to saw that this film doesn’t have something to say about the Australian car culture at some level (the Australian government would complete a decades long effort to drive out auto manufacturers by 2016). I dunno. That distance and specificity may be why the film was a financial dud in international markets upon its release and why its reputation has simply not revived in the ensuing decades.

I think part of that specificity can be highlighted by its opening. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the opening. It’s probably my favorite part of the film, but it’s extremely specific to Australian in the early 70s. It’s a satirical recreation of some commercials that played at the opening of movies in Australian theaters, usually about cigarettes. Weir used Alpine cigarettes being held up prominently to the camera, along with some Coca-Cola bottles, by an attractive pair who then get horribly murdered during a road accident down a curvy road. This was designed to trick audiences used to those kinds of commercials before films started, to shock them a bit when it turned out to be part of the film. I think the moment it turns into the film itself is funny from a blunt, dry humor point of view, but its real point is so precisely designed for a particular time and place that it makes me wonder about the rest of the film.

The rest of the film revolves around the survivor of another car accident, Arthur (Terry Camilleri), who was in the back seat of the car when his brother drove over the curve outside of Paris, Australia. The mayor of Paris, Len (John Meillon) decides that Arthur will not leave and become a Parisian. Arthur stays at Len’s house where he gets to know Len’s wife Beth (Melissa Jaffer) and two adopted daughters (one with a horrible scar on the side of her face that she covers with her hair), gets to know her, and gets given a job under the, perhaps, absolutely insane Dr. Midland (Kevin Miles) who delights in the freedom he gets living far from urban centers, helped by Daryl (Chris Haywood), the only young person with any social position in the city. The rest of the young people, as described by Len, are lazy, directionless, and need work. They run around the outskirts of the town in souped up cars, causing havoc here and there.

So, what ends up being the point of all this? Is Paris supposed to be a metaphor for the Australian government’s efforts to mimic America and just ending up oppressive and inept? I mean, I could see it, but, if that’s the case, then there’s got to be some story underneath it to package it in an interesting way?

The answer to that would be: No, not really. Arthur as a main character seems to have been a central mistake. As played by Camilleri, he’s quiet and passive, kind of shuffling from one thing he doesn’t want to do to another. He whispers most of his lines uncomfortably while becoming something of a pawn for Len, ultimately becoming a Parking Officer whose actions sets off the final conflict. His central arc is that he can’t bring himself to drive because a year before the film, he killed a man while driving and got sentence for manslaughter, so he can suddenly drive a car in the end of the movie in the middle of a bunch of other cars running around the town tearing it up. He feels more like a vehicle for an idea that a character, especially a character with something to really root for. It’s more like we have just someone to root against, Len.

For, Len leads the town in forcing visitors on the road to crash and selling the parts of the cars off. Is this a metaphor? I think so. What’s it a metaphor for? I have no clue. This is a similar problem to Homesdale where the symbolism and metaphor was so important that the actual story itself made little to no sense. Here, the story makes not a whole lot of sense either since everything doesn’t seem to exist on its own but only in service to its subtext. Subtext is important, but if your primary purpose in telling a story isn’t the story itself, well…you kind of lose the story, the reason people showed up.

Again, this isn’t really bad. It’s just not really connecting with the audience. I appreciate ideas in my movies, but they really need to be packaged well with story to make it work, and throw in the specificity of the issues at play (I assume), and you have something really just made for Australians who lived at a certain moment in time.

Weir was off to a rough start, but despite the mixed results of his first pair of films, there was still promise on display. Visually, he made the most of his limitations in the first film and the expanded budget in his second. Performances are bitterly and darkly comic, fitting the material as well as could be (flawed material though it may have been). I look forward to Weir finding better material to help him find that promise always just over the horizon but never arriving.

Rating: 2/4