Hammers Over the Anvil

The summer of 1910 becomes a trial for the 14-year-old Alan who is on the brink of maturity. He has one passion in life - he wants to become a horseman like his hero East Driscoll. But the odds are against Alan, since he suffers from polio. When East
the horseman meets Grace McAlistar, a woman of the aristocracy, Alan becomes the messenger in a passionate but doomed love story.

COMMENTARY
Ann Turner's new movie Hammers Over the Anvil is about Alan, a boy in the rural, macho Australia at the turn of the century. Alan's biggest dream is to become a real horseman like his hero, East the horse-trainer. But Alan suffers from polio and is unable to get his paralyzed legs over the back of a horse. Considering other films of this typically Australian genre which glorifies male energy and companionship, this is a novel device: in a society which despises weakness and where a man is only defined in terms of brute force, Alan suffers from being ''weak and soft''. And what is worse; his father who used to be a horseman quit and opened a grocery store instead.
Alan's road to self-knowledge, and to accepting his handicap, goes via the stormy love story between East and the upperclass woman Grace which he becomes a witness to.
Ann Turner has obviously chosen a different path from Celia, a film which in many ways resembles Agneta F agerstri:im-
Olsson's movie Seppan in its way of portraying childhood as the playground of both magical events and false idylls.
The purpose behind the identification with a handicapped boy and his difficulties in finding himself in a complicated world is not difficult to see in the light of Ann Turner's own words. ''After watching the housewives in Adelaide go insane in their prison of conventions and frightening conformity I grabbed hold of feminism like a lifebuoy. But I was the only woman in my year at school. 15 young men - and I wasn't even allowed to touch the camera. It ended in a physical encounter with the loudest one. Ridiculous of course, since I was short in stature and in no way a fighter ... '' In Hammers Over the Anvil there are no violent settlements of either conventions or gender stereotypes. Charlotte Rampling plays Grace, a character who wants more than being an eye-catcher, a catalyst, a scapegoat. But in the end the picture-book closes with a bang and leaves me jumping to a number of conclusions. ':'
Mikaela Kindblom

Medverkande
Russell Crowe, Charlotte Rampling: Producent
Ben Gannon: Manus
Peter Hepworth, Ann Turner: Foto
James Bartle: Musik
Not Drowning, Waving: Talat språk
English