Paradise Road - Study Notes
Overview:
Beginning in February 1942 with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Paradise Road tells
the story of a group of women from diverse backgrounds who struggle to endure the
conditions of a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Sumatra. The film clearly establishes at
its start the arrogance and overconfidence of the British towards the Japanese attack.
“We’re ready and waiting for them,” one of the men says at the start. While others dismiss
the possibility of a Japanese victory with racist insults such as, “they’re all cross eyed, you
know,” and “they all have white sticks and guide dogs.”
The opening credits also include a set of pictures
which establish the imperial setting of the film.
They are shots of British life in South East Asia,
including this one to the left of a successful hunting
party. What this tells us about is the British attitude
of being in charge. It’s this attitude that leads to the
arrogant belief that anything other than victory over
the Japanese was impossible.
But the opening credits also establish another pervasive cultural phenomenon: it’s men
who know and do things. They are the experts, the people of action - women are not. Apart
from Mrs Pike, it’s men who make the racist slurs at the start and dismiss the Japanese
attack. Topsy Merrit and Adrienne Pargiter both question this, with Topsy asking why an
army that blew away Pearl Harbour couldn’t easily overrun Singapore. But these objections
are patronisingly swept away with a ‘My dear ladies....’ comment that really means ‘you
don’t know what your talking about’. In the background, we see Rosemary and her
husband are dancing. Dennis says Rosemary is “beautiful.” Rosemary calls him beautiful
too which unsettles Dennis: “You can’t say that about a man!” No, this is a man’s world in
which women must follow.
All that changes and yet it doesn’t change. When the women from Singapore are rounded
up and incarcerated in a POW camp, life is dramatically altered. Suddenly they need to
cope on their own without men. And they must cope with each other. There is tension
between the groups of women. There are the English speaking women, and the Dutch
speaking women (wives and daughters of Dutch colonial plantation owners from Sumatra,
plus a group of Dutch nuns). There are also women from different social classes: they are
English ladies like Adrienne, Mrs Roberts, Rosemary, Mrs Pike and Mrs Dickson and
people who don’t belong to their class (practically everybody else) like Daisy. Adrienne
says to Daisy later in the film: “We never mixed with missionaries - we were taught to look
down on them.” So the women must learn to navigate these problems with each other in
order to survive this conflict. And yet it is still a man’s world, because not only do the
women need to survive each other, they need to survive their treatment at the hands of the
male Japanese soldiers. Daisy has seen the actions of the Japanese army in China and says,
“The people they despised most were Europeans, then prisoners, then women.”
The film is a true ensemble drama. It’s not the heroic story of one person’s capacity to
survive unendurable conditions, but rather the history of a group of women who make
A Ticking Mind Resource!1
