Set in Indonesia in 1965, Peter Weir's film, The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) depicted "a love caught in the fire of revolution," according to its tag line. The literal "fire" was supplied by re-enactments of PKI demonstrations against US imperialism while the metaphorical fire, and the one that admittedly held my interest then, was the one that smoldered between Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson playing Western expats. Their romance was altogether satisfactory to me in 1983 and no doubt

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... to an audience yet untroubled by questions about Gibson's sanity. He was pretty then, and so was she. That their characters were surrounded by smaller, browner people who seemed to have equally urgent, though intentionally more nebulous desires seemed less to the point. I was therefore caught up short by my sister's dismissive comment afterward: "He's in a country full of Asian women and he falls for the only white woman for miles around."