Hong Kong Second Wave director Clara Law was born in Macau, grew up in Hong Kong, studied in the UK, and moved to Australia in her forties. Perhaps this constant relocation is what enabled her to create the bizarre and surreal geography in The Goddess of 1967, distilled and altered from the feral landscape of Australia and snippets of the hyper-technological cityscape of Tokyo. Although the general trajectory of the film adheres to the road movie genre, time and space are both arranged in mesmerizingly fluid ways.
The story begins with Yoshiyasu (adorably played by Rikiya Kurokawa), a wealthy hacker from Tokyo, flying to Australia to buy a Citroën DS (the "Goddess"). He arrives to find that the seller has killed himself. The seller's blind cousin, Deidre (an energetic and touching Rose Byrne), tells him she can take him to the real owner of the car, about a week's drive into the outback. The two embark on the trip, and fall in love, sweetly and haltingly. Flashbacks about Deidre's traumatic past are interwoven into the present. The ending felt a little too preachy with its heavy-handed use of metaphors, though the liberal use of symbolism throughout generally contributed positively to the fairytale-like atmosphere of the film.
Each scene seems casually framed, yet are (jump-)cut together with energy and exuberance. Slow, searching zooms seem to echo Deidre's outstretched, fluttering hands. All in all, The Goddess of 1967 is beautifully stylistic film with a convincing emotional core.
