Horse Latitudes

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HURRICANE Directed by Jan Troell Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to remake Hurricane in the first place. It is a dour period piece about miscegenation in the South Seas more than a half-century ago, in which the daughter (Mia Farrow) of Pago Pago's American military governor (Jason Robards) falls for the proud native prince of a nearby is land (Dayton Ka'ne, winner of a talent search in which everyone should have looked harder). The only hope for Hurricane would have been turning it into a send-up of the old tropical lagoony genre.

Instead, the script drops many heavy-handed hints of incestuous longings between father and daughter and visits much trendy brutality on the poor prince for daring to imagine that blonds might be more fun. There is also a nasty ritual defloration sequence involving the girl he was supposed to marry before Mia came along.

Still, all this has a bit more energy than the affair between Farrow and Ka'ne, who after endless delays are mostly directed to nibble each other's necks and take decorously clothed swims and beach walks to demonstrate their affection. Swedish Film Maker Jan Troell, who has made terse, beautiful movies (The Emigrants, The New Land), here seems merely distant and befuddled, as does his usually superb cameraman, Sven Nykvist. The poorly shot concluding hurricane is supposed to be a sort of heavenly analogy to human passions we have been witnessing at play. In the circumstances a light breeze would have done.

--Richard Schickel

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