Beyond Rangoon
by John Boorman
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Frances McDormand, Patricia Arquette, Spalding Gray, Tiara Jacquelina, U Aung KoDirector: John Boorman
Brand: Warner Brothers
Producer: John Boorman
Producer: Alex Lasker
Writer: Alex Lasker
Producer: Barry Spikings
Producer: Bill Rubenstein
Writer: Bill Rubenstein
Producer: Eric Pleskow
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Japanese (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 100 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-05-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Beyond Rangoon
Movie Review: This movie deserves to be released on DVD!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I went to see this film three times when it was in the theatres. It is such a great movie. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is about a doctor whose grief from the senseless murder of her husband and son keeps her from practicing medicine. Her sister takes her to Burma (Myanmar) to help her get away from her suffering. While she is there, she gets caught in the clash between their harsh military dictatorship and nonviolent democracy movement. As she struggles to get across the border to free and democratic Thailand, she learns how she is far from alone when it comes to grief and suffering. She is finally ready to put her medical knowledge to good use again. This movie really should be made available on DVD. I hope it will be someday soon and, more importantly, I hope the people of Burma win their nonviolent struggle for democracy. Long live Aung San Suu Kyi!!!
Summary of Beyond Rangoon
Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 05/26/2009 Run time: 92 minutes Rating: RWorking at the top of his form, John Boorman is a director who can pursue the poetry of his personal obsessions within the framework of a dynamic thriller and not shortchange the film. Beyond Rangoon involves a journey into unfamiliar territory: the rivers, jungles, and war-torn backcountry of Burma in 1988; But it also ventures into the mythic Arthurian terrain of such seemingly disparate films as Excalibur, Point Blank, and Deliverance. This time, uniquely in this director's work, the quester is a woman. American doctor Laura Bowman (Patricia Arquette) regards her life as having ended after the brutal murder of her husband and their little boy by home invaders. Her sister (Frances McDormand) has persuaded her to come along on a sightseeing tour of Burma. The trip leaves Laura numb until, impulsively venturing into the night alone, she becomes witness to a crisis moment in history: the beginning of the military dictatorship's violent crackdown on the rising democracy movement. The sight of Aung San Suu Kyi, the dissidents' inspirational leader, facing down a wall of armed soldiers with only the power of serene self-possession inspires Laura (an amazing scene--and it really did happen).
But that's only the beginning of Laura?s movement toward enlightenment, and back to life. Beyond Rangoon abounds in memorable encounters--with individuals variously supportive and terrifying, and with locations and situations where hope and catastrophe trade off like valences of the same energy. As critic Kathleen Murphy has noted, "It's as though the fabric of reality shivers like water, racking focus into a new, altered pattern of experience." (Case in point: the startling image of a car's rear window star-shattered by a pursuer's bullet as Laura drives down an almost nonexistent jungle road--the pursuit car sharply irised in the bullet hole.) Boorman makes us feel the total chaos of a spectacularly beautiful land that is not only at the mercy of a brutal regime but utterly cut off from an outside world that doesn't, can't, know what's happening there. In this, Boorman's movie immeasurably increased awareness of Burma's tragedy, but it hasn't prevented the government of what's now called Myanmar from keeping Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest more than 20 years later. --Richard T. Jameson
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