TV Obsessive
The Cars That Ate Paris
Hal: The thoroughly demented and wildly ambitious breakthrough of filmmaker Peter Weir, and one of the films that kicked off the wave of Oz-ploitation cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, The Cars That Ate Paris is perhaps stranger than any film Weir made subsequently. The film blends the parodic depiction of a uniquely Australian desire to project a suburban respectability—neatly encapsulated in the repellent naked aborigine ornament in the mayor’s (John Meillon) front garden—with a dystopian rust-tinted vehicular fetishisation predictive of George Miller’s Mad Max films.
The film follows a timid man named Arthur (Terry Camilleri), who is involved in a road accident that claims the life of his brother, on the outskirts of the quiet rural village of Paris. As he recovers from his injuries, the weak willed Arthur finds his hosts curiously keen for him to stay, and the viewer soon realises there is something deeply wrong with the insular town of Paris, something that goes beyond it’s unusually high number of road accidents.
So much of the bizarre nature of The Cars That Ate Paris (isn’t that a fantastic title?), comes in how mundane the presentation is. Weir directs in a low-budget, realistic style that is maintained even as the drama escalates. The alternately disturbing and darkly humorous nature of the story maintains a perplexing set of dynamics throughout that adds to the ever changing social setup of the community. Though Arthur is our introduction to the village, the film shortly becomes about Paris itself. Our initial suspicions about the town and its people are soon confirmed. However, the power structures within the town are less clear cut than one might suppose. The hypocritical town elders face off against the near feral, death-worshipping hoons, who threaten their town’s respectable facade, with the pitiable Arthur caught in the middle.
Many have been unkind to The Cars That Ate Paris, though it has earned itself some admirers, including Stanley Kubrick, with whom it was a particular favourite. It’s admittedly hard to know what to make of its strange and surreal expose of small town dysfunction, but it’s a fairly safe supposition that you’ll not have seen anything quite like it before: half Britannia Hospital, half Wake in Fright.
