Month: June 2024

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Furiosa and curiosa

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

What a strange beast Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is.  Yes, it’s a Mad Max movie, directed and co-written by the franchise’s mastermind George Miller.  But it’s one (almost) devoid of Mad Max.  Instead, it concentrates on Imperator Furiosa, the formidable warrior-woman played by Charlize Theron who partnered the title character in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.  Furiosa fills us in on her backstory, from her childhood to early womanhood.  Thus, it’s a prequel to Fury Road and a discombobulating departure from the customary format of the Mad Max films.

 

If you had to sum up the structure of the earlier four movies in one word, that word would be linear.  Things just barrelled along in a straight line.  Indeed, the two best ones, Mad Max II (1982) and Fury Road, were basically ongoing vehicle chases, with plot and characterisation having to scramble on board during the brief moments when people’s feet eased on the accelerators.  Not that I’m knocking them.  Mad Max II is one of my favourite films of the 1980s and I consider Fury Road one of the best films of the 21st century.

 

But with Furiosa, Miller – bravely or foolishly, depending on your point of view – abandons the formula that’s hitherto served him so well and presents a movie with other things besides big, metallic, wheeled things hurtling after and crashing into one another.  There are periods of quiet and calm, where the emphasis is on dialogue, characterisation and violence-free drama rather than on hectic, in-your-face action.  Parts of it even get a bit slow.

 

Which isn’t to say Furiosa lacks action.  It begins with an edge-of-your-seat (if small-scale) chase, and later there are two lengthy action set-pieces that rank among the most thrilling the franchise has produced, even if one of them incorporates a bit too much CGI.  Overall, though, comparing one of the earlier Mad Maxes with this entry is like – to cite two examples from a sub-genre that heavily influenced the series originally, the spaghetti western – comparing Sergio Leone’s lean, taut A Fistful of Dollars (1964) with his sprawling epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

No, I’m not claiming that Furiosa is as good as Once Upon a Time in the West (one of my top half-dozen movies ever, incidentally).  I also think it falls short of the greatness achieved by Fury Road.  But I still found it pretty impressive.  Before I discuss the movie in detail, though, I should warn you – from here on there will be spoilers.

 

The film gets going with the afore-mentioned chase.  Some scumbag bikers abduct little Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from her community in the Green Place, a Garden of Eden-like hideaway that’s somehow survived the apocalypse that’s ravaged the rest of the earth in the Mad Max version of the future.  Her mother (Charlee Fraser) pursues them into the Wasteland and the scumbag bikers are killed one by one, but not before the last of them manages to deliver Furiosa to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), leader of a gang with a self-explanatory name, the Biker Horde.

 

A subsequent attempt to rescue Furiosa results in the mother’s death and Dementus keeps the little girl, partly as his gang’s mascot, partly as a surrogate daughter.  “Do not look away, you mustn’t look away!” he urges her while he crucifies her mother in front of her, believing that the trauma will toughen her up and make her better suited to the Wasteland.  He’s obviously a dad who believes in the ‘school of hard knocks’ approach to raising kids.  He also muses, “When things go bonkers, you have to adapt.”

 

Later, he and his Horde stumble across the Citadel that figured, or will figure, in Fury Road and come face to face with the Citadel’s implacable, pustular ruler Immortan Joe.  Here, Joe is played by Lachie Hulme.  Hugh Keays-Byrne, the actor who played him in Fury Road (and also played the franchise’s original villain, Toecutter, back in 1979’s Mad Max) passed away in 2020.  The Biker Horde manages to capture the Citadel’s satellite-settlement Gastown, responsible for producing the fuel for Joe’s vehicles.  After some hard bargaining, Joe reluctantly cedes control of Gastown to Dementus, but demands some concessions from the biking warlord in return.  These include him taking custody of Furiosa.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Born in the healthy environs of the Green Place, Furiosa is genetically undamaged and Joe, desperate for some normal-bodied and able-minded offspring, fancies her as a future wife.  As we know from Fury Road, he has a squad of young wives locked away for breeding purposes, though the results have been disappointing so far – as evidenced by the two sons he’s acquired, the hulking, thick-as-mince Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and the psychotic Scabrous Scrotus (Josh Helman).  Not keen on the idea of ending up a spouse to Immortan Joe, Furiosa escapes from his harem, disguises herself as a boy, pretends to be mute and finds employment in the Citadel’s garages.

 

A few years later, after various adventures, and now played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes apprenticed to the tough but kindly Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), driver of the War Rig, the giant truck that’s the pride of Joe’s vehicular fleet.  “You have about you a purposeful savagery,” Praetorian Jack informs her, which in the Wasteland is as close to a compliment as you can get.

 

Praetorian Jack and the now Praetorian Furiosa gradually bond, to the point where Jack agrees to help her return to the Green Place.  But bigger events get in their way.  Namely, Dementus’s running of Gastown becomes such a disaster that Immortan Joe and his allies vow to get rid of him, even if this means a full-scale war raging in the Wasteland…

 

One thing I liked about Furiosa was the chance to see certain characters from Fury Road again.  Not just Immortan Joe, but subsidiary villains like Rictus Erectus, the People Eater (John Howard), the Bullet Farmer (Lee Perry, replacing the original actor Richard Carter, who died in 2019) and the Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson), who’s the nearest thing in the Wasteland to a GP and has the thankless task of delivering Joe’s stillborn and / or mutant kids.  But what pleased me most was a fleeting reappearance by the Doof Warrior, the goon who rides in front of a giant wall of speakers whilst playing a splendid, flamethrowing electric guitar.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

Furiosa presents us with some cool new characters as well, mostly in Dementus’s entourage.  There’s the piratical Rizzdale Pell (Lachy Hulme in a second role) who, unlike normal movie pirates, doesn’t bother to conceal an empty eye-socket with an eyepatch.  Also facially disfigured is the zombie-like Mr. Norton, who’s actually a Ms. and is played by Elsa Pataky, Chris Hemsworth’s real-life wife, no less.  And I was impressed by the Octoboss (Goran D. Kleut), a satanic figure clad in black, horned armour who rides / flies into battle on a motorbike-cum-kite, trailing a long, black, tendrilous parachute behind him.

 

Dementus also employs two cheerleaders.  He has a Gollum-like weirdo called Smeg (David Collins) acting out his ever-changing moods in a series of strange, performative dances.  And he has a warm-up man called the History Man (George Shevstov) who warns potential adversaries about his boss’s ‘congress of destruction’, i.e., the thousands of motorbikes massed behind him.  The History Man additionally serves the gang as a bard and as an archivist of knowledge, stories and language, which he has tattooed in tiny writing all over his body.  He’s asked to dredge up appropriate words from the mostly-forgotten lexicon of English to mark special occasions: “History Man!  A word-burger if you please!”  And he provides the film with its narration, which implies the saga of Furiosa has been added to this anarchic society’s repository of legend and lore.

 

But among the new characters, the biggest star is Dementus himself.  Chris Hemsworth obviously relished the opportunity to set aside his goody-two-shoes image as Thor in the Marvel cinematic universe and play somebody gloriously, evilly unhinged.  While cunning and ruthless enough to make a credible post-apocalyptic warlord, there’s also a touch of ridiculous, Spinal Tap-style heavy metal-ness about him.  This means that, ultimately, he’s never going to be smart enough to defeat Immortan Joe, still Top Dog when Fury Road rolls around.  He’s merely likely to cause a lot of damage along the way. Inevitably, Dementus gets the best lines.  He goadingly demands of Furiosa, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” or “Where were you going, so full of hope?  There is no hope!”  Best of all is a muttered aside when a minion disputes his orders: “Hmm, questioning my boss-ority…”

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

It says a lot for the more measured performances by Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke that they manage to make their presences felt, and Hemsworth doesn’t walk away with the film.

 

With so many good elements, then, why do I feel Furiosa is less effective than Fury Road?  Well, it’s rather too long and, while earlier parts of the film are languidly paced, there’s rather too much happening, too much Machiavellian scheming and double-crossing going on, in its later stages.  Also, the franchise’s long-term fans will be frustrated that the war between Dementus and Irmmortan Joe, when it finally arrives, is represented only by a brief montage and a voice-over from the History Man.  Instead, the film’s focus becomes personal.  It zooms in on Furiosa pursuing and confronting Dementus over her mother’s long-ago murder.  I can see what Miller was trying to do, and respect his bravery in doing it, but I’d have preferred things to end with a bigger bang.

 

Still, after seeing it a few days ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about Furiosa.  Things about it that didn’t occur to me in the cinema have occurred to me since.  For example, the nature of Praetorian Jack’s relationship with Furiosa is kept vague and at the time I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a romantic one.  Now I see him more as being a father-figure to her, which nicely fills the void left by her mother’s death.  I also appreciate, with hindsight, how the script uses peaches – yes, peaches – as a motif.  Furiosa is seen picking them at the start, her mother gives her a peach-pit as a memento shortly before she dies, and the same pit has a bearing on what Furiosa does to Dementus at the end (at least, according to the story she tells the History Man).

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

 

And during a Wasteland sequence that’s particularly brutal and traumatic for Furiosa, Miller’s camera leaps back into the surrounding mountains for a moment, and we see a familiar silhouette watching events from afar, next to his trademark V8 Interceptor.  I wonder now if Mad Max’s cameo is meant to show he has a connection with Furiosa even before he meets her in Fury Road.  Does what he observes here remind him of the loss of his family in the original movie?

 

Despite its quality, Furiosa has done badly at the box office.  I suspect many blokes who enjoy action movies chose to skip this one because it wasn’t about Mad Max but about – ugh! – a girl.  Conversely, it obviously didn’t appeal to family audiences.  About a girl it may be, but Furiosa is also the most brutal Mad Max film yet.  It’s got the highest body-count and, while the franchise has always managed to be violent without wallowing in gore, there are more moments than usual where bullets strike faces, flamethrowers torch bodies, throats get slashed and body-parts are severed.  Sadly, Furiosa‘s underperformance has cast doubt on whether George Miller’s planned sixth entry in the franchise, Mad Max: The Wasteland, will ever be filmed.

 

To borrow two of Dementus’s quotes…  It’s a pity that after Furiosa’s box-office flop, people are questioning Miller’s boss-ority.  Because he still has in him to be epic.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Kennedy Miller Mitchell

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Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

 

© Eon Productions

 

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit…  I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London.  Time, I think, for a 35th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

 

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’.  That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill.  Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

 

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic.  In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig.  But it rarely gets any credit for that.

 

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted.  I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie.  When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history.  That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck.  It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based.  But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

 

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie.  Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

 

© Eon Productions

 

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists.  This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

 

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot.  Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

 

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die).  Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill).  He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge.  Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!”  Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation.  Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

 

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus.  He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in.  (“You earned it!  You keep it!”)

 

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill.  This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

 

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier.  There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong.  This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side.  An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke).  Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles.  Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

 

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine.  A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him.  Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age.  But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

 

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films.  Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’.  But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming.  Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it.  But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Not that the film is unremittingly dark.  It has some amusing lines and likeable performances.  One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn.  Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets.  (“Everything for a man on holiday.  Explosive alarm clock…  Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it.  Dentonite toothpaste…  To be used sparingly.  The latest in plastic explosive.”  “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.)  After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond.  In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

 

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast.  A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez.  He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy.  Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro.  Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces  in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

 

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell.  Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl.  From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business.  Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts).  It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda.  She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

 

© Eon Productions

 

What else do I like about Licence to Kill?  I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction.  Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die.  I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film.  The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

 

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding.  “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.”  (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”)  This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

 

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though.  There are a couple of longueurs.  For a man who’s recently lost  wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end.  Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital.  And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl.  When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

 

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond.  When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role.  I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing.  As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade.  He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

 

© Eon Productions

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Two temples by the sea

 

 

Pura Tanah Lot is a Hindu sea-temple founded in the 16th century and located on Bali’s southern coast.  It sits on top of a pedestal of rock that, when the tide is in, becomes an island and is inaccessible from the shore.  When the tide is out, a rugged, rocky shelf forms a causeway connecting the temple and its pedestal to the mainland.

 

My partner and I arrived there one afternoon while the tide was out beyond the temple.  The shelf between it and the shore was a messy palette of seaweed-greens and damp-looking greys and browns.  Here and there, pools of trapped seawater glinted in the sun like shards of blue glass.

 

 

The rock supporting the temple has a froth of vegetation, including trees, growing along its landward side while the temple-buildings are clustered on its seaward side.  Flights of stone steps coil up the rock but, when we visited, most sightseers had to be content with wandering about the drained shelf around it.  Only a few folk, serious worshippers, were allowed to ascend the steps to the temple itself.

 

 

We made our way to the temple’s southern side, mainly to get out of the heat and glare of the afternoon sun, which was so fierce it created a glowing white band across the sea.  There, we scrambled up onto a higher level of the shelf, where parts of it were carpeted in mushy brown growths, like pulped kelp.  Viewed from this position, the temple and its pedestal had the shape of a sagging haystack.  But we couldn’t go the whole way around the temple because we came to a fracture in the shelf, which extended to the bottom of the temple-rock from the ocean.  The fracture had created a gorge, with seawater racing tumultuously along its bottom.

 

 

Predictably, vendors and pedlars were selling their wares among the throng of sightseers between the temple and the shore. One was hawking kites and had one up in the air, shaped like a galleon with fancy, multicoloured sails.  Meanwhile, along the shoreline, at the bottom of the miniature cliffs there, were some cavities that looked like cave entrances.  One had a queue of people waiting to go inside and a sign above saying ‘ULAR SUCI – HOLY SNAKE’.  This was explained by the temple’s website: “The cave is inhabited by some holy sea snakes, which are believed as (sic) incarnations of shawls of Dang Hyang Nirartha (founder of Tanah Lot Temple).”  In other words, Dang Hyang Nirartha is said to have created the sea snakes from his shawl, or sash, to protect the temple against evil spirits.

 

 

The ground overlooking Pura Tanah Lot is home to an attractive temple complex.  It has well-maintained green spaces and handsome statues that, unlike the discoloured and lichened ones I’ve seen in other Balinese temples, are clad brightly in gold-coloured robes and armour.

 

 

Pura Luhur Uluwatu is another of Bali’s famous sea-temples.  It’s further south, is located on the western tip of the Bukit Peninsula and was officially established in the 11th century, though a small place of worship may have existed there site earlier.

 

After the entrance and ticket desk, the approach to the temple was through a pleasantly leafy, wooded area.  However, a stark red sign warned us of potential dangers ahead: “BE CAREFUL IN BRINGING ITEMS SUCH AS SUNGLASSES, HATS, HANDPHONES, ETC., BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY MONKEYS IN THIS AREA.  IF YOUR STUFF IS TAKEN BY A MONKEY, REACH FOR (sic) OUR OFFICER.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET THE STUFF BACK WITHOUT ASSISTANCE FROM OUR OFFICER.  The information about the monkeys swiping phones particularly alarmed us.  Currently resident in Singapore, our smartphones are laden with important Singaporean ID, banking and  transport apps and we’d be screwed if we lost them.  So, we agreed that, during our visit, one of us would take photos with their camera-phone while the other kept a lookout for marauding monkeys.

 

Further on, in the temple complex, we found a sign giving more details about the local monkey population.  There are 11 hectares of woodland surrounding the temple, known as Uluwatu Forest, and in it live some 400 grey long-tailed macaques.  These are divided into six groups – named riting, tapak, melem, celagi, amplung and gading – whose members range from 50 to 150.  The fact they were organised in gangs made them seem more criminal then ever.

 

The woodland extended right to the temple, so that its grounds were bathed in green-tinted light and rippling shadows.  But because the place is perched on a cliff, 97 metres up, this eventually gave way to dramatic views of the Indian Ocean.

 

 

Having looked at the temple, we set off down some flights of stone steps and along a path that followed the clifftop to the north.  Below, the glassy blue of the sea changed to a mottled blue, white and teal near the shore, and became a turbulent white froth along the rocks at the cliff’s base.  The cliffs themselves were largely bearded in green vegetation, with a sprinkling of scarlet flowers at the top.  We came to a viewpoint at the path’s end, took some pictures – still guarding against monkeys – and headed back.

 

While approaching the temple again, we heard ahead of us a chorus of shrieks – female ones.  The monkeys had raided a party of Chinese lady tourists.  And a few minutes later, back at the temple, we saw one monkey crouching on a wall besides some steps, playing with somebody’s floppy white hat.

 

Another path ran along the clifftop to the south. It was scenic too but the landscape there was less spectacularly contoured than it was along the northern path.

 

 

This temple also contained some interesting statues.  There was a crouching, snarling, winged creature, its maw crammed with short tusks, like a canine variant on the Hindu / Buddhist / Jain half-bird, half-human deity Garuda.  There was a statue of Ganesha, left arm raised and crooked at the elbow as if scratching his head.  I have to say this was the most monstrous representation I’ve seen of this usually genial, elephant-headed deity.  The effect was because of his big, blank, boiled-egg-like eyes and his tusks, which were more like fangs, short and thrusting up from his lower jaw.

 

Finally, there was a statue of the monkey-god Hanuman, in an Action Man pose, wearing battle armour and screaming with exertion.  However, lots of little monkeys were swarming around him, climbing up his legs and arms.  I know he’s supposed to command a monkey army, but in this depiction it looked more like his minions were attacking him.

 

 

Either that, or they were trying to pinch his phone.