A journal of creative thought and feeling published by LIOS ...

Still lodged in the Kipling Hotel, Laura dreams of her lost life, and
Boorman’s camera lifts to look down on her through a revolving
ceiling fan. Almost immediately, as though galvanized by that
circular motion, she wakes to the sounds of people running,
shouting in the street. This is Beyond Rangoon’s first formal
wakeup call to take to the saving road, and Laura chases the street
rally as though hastening not to a tense standoff between soldiers
and political protesters, but toward some longed-for reunion.
Heralding the coming of Aung San Suu Kyi (Nobel Prize-winning,
heroic dissident under house arrest for years and now on trial in
Burma, played by Adelle Lutz), the Burmese woman who heads
the mostly youthful dissidents, a little girl shyly touches Laura’s
hand, the first in a series of guiding, arming signals by children
who stand in reality for the counsel offered by her murdered son
in dreams.
Suu Kiy walks deliberately into the soldiers’ ranked guns, almost
the graceful hostess greeting guests. Laura watches, mesmerized, as
the woman’s serenely beautiful face gathers and aims the power of
self until she literally quakes the uniformed men out of her way.
In Boorman’s Merlin-animated mise-en-scene, Suu Kiy becomes
Laura’s patron goddess. Standing in for the Arthurian lady in the
lake, she opens a channel of creative energy, breaking Laura’s “curse”
to turn stone into flesh-and-blood warrior.
Once mothered, Laura attaches herself to an exquisitely civilized
cicerone in the guise of fatherly Aung Ko, a university professor
imprisoned and exiled forever from teaching for his support of antigovernment
students. Boorman makes
us see and feel mythic resonance each
time his heroine crosses a Rubicon: it’s
as though the fabric of reality shivers
like water, racking focus into a new,
altered pattern of experience. In one
eerie exchange, Laura’s head turns—
almost in slow motion—to witness the
old man, bent forward, Sisyphus-like,
outside the passenger side of the car,
laboriously pushing the stalled vehicle
through a pelting rainstorm. With
near-ritual precision, Laura opens
her door, gets out into the heavy weather, and wordlessly adds her
weight to the effort.
And later on in our knight’s reanimation, she and Aung Ko careen
down a forest track in that old car, closely pursued by government
troops. A shot is fired, the professor is hit, and Boorman’s heroine
turns to look back–her rear-window view of rapidly gaining death
framed through the circle of a bullet hole. Previously, Laura had
gazed out impassively through car-window glass, wiped by passing,
unreal reflections. But now her bell jar has been shattered by a
plunge into the down-and-dirty, the ground where matters of life
and death draw blood.
Cast into a muddy
river with her badly
wounded friend,
Laura swims away
from the soldiers’
guns; her panting
grunts erupt from
deep inside her. In
contrast to her nearly
disembodied scream
when the child fell
from the Buddha,
these are the primal sounds of an animal fighting blindly, ruthlessly
to stay alive. Baptism and resurrection intersect, exhilaratingly, in
the rising line of her firm-fleshed arm as it reaches up–in Boorman’s
trademark image of power born of regenerative waters–to grasp a
low-hanging limb. At this moment, Laura becomes her own Lady of
the Lake, raising her submerged will, unsheathing the Excalibur of
her spirit from stone.
Almost immediately, true to mythic tradition, she faces a crucial
setback: thrashing to break through tangled branches at river’s
edge, Laura is thrown backwards, to literally grovel in a muddy
soup after she drops the locket that contains pictures of her beloved
dead. Kneeling in place, clutching her funerary talisman, Boorman’s
mother-healer trances out, as she does at several crucial junctures:
her wonderfully molded face blanks, her eyes go flat with a dull
darkness, and the flesh that lately pulsed with the desire to stay alive
pales, as though her very blood had receded, stopped flowing.
The sound of suffering Aung Ko’s groan
labors Laura back into life; she takes
renewed fire, picking up a cudgel to
beat down the thicket she has despaired
of escaping. As she explodes out of the
foliage, she’s greeted by the sight of a
little Burmese boy—he has a perfectly
legitimate reason for being there, but
he’s also a reflection of the lively child
released in her as well as the receding
ghost of her son.
Director / creator Boorman “dreams”
Patricia Arquette as he wants and needs his heroine to be. (In his
serious-whimsical I Dreamt I Woke Up, Boorman and John Hurt,
who plays the director as dreamer, exchange horrified glances at the
sight and sound of an ungendered, militantly anti-magic feminist;
Hurt turns desperately to his movie-making self to demand, “Can’t
you make her the way we want her to be?”) Weaving Merlin’s “spell
of making” from his Excalibur, Arquette’s auteur magicks his lady
Arthur into an heroic largeness that could never have been achieved
simply by the actress’s gaining 25 pounds for the shoot.
In the amniotic fluid of Boorman’s imagination and Burma’s many
rivers, Arquette grows as performer and character to inhabit her
(continued on page 31)
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