AustLit

'Perhaps the best word that describes the distinct quality of Clara Law's latest film The Goddess of 1967 (2000) is postmodern. Unlike any other contemporary Australian feature-filmmaker, she betrays an astute, experimental attitude to the medium, an inclination to gather and juxtapose markedly different people and places and disparate cultural meanings (the outback, machine and modernity, the city) and a strong interest in states of transition, dislocation, and isolation. In Goddess, a blind girl "B.G" (Rose Byrne) and Japanese man "J.M." (Rikiya Kurokawa) journey through the Australian outback in a Citroen named 'Goddess' toward a 'heart of darkness' or primal, originating point that ultimately sets the soul of the young blind girl free. Intermittently punctuating what is essentially a forward-journey-back-in-time are flashbacks of the past, mainly of B.G.'s past but also J.M.'s, a Roland Barthes quote, and advertising footage and statistics celebrating the superiority in design and manufacture of the Citroen. However, despite the postmodern sensibility and sophisticated experimental play with sound, music, camera work, colour and the landscape, ideas of character and story remain essentially conventional and clichéd throughout Goddess, producing a strange mismatch effect throughout the film.' (Author's introduction)