Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
The Getting of Wisdom
The Getting of Wisdom
Stars: Susannah Fowle, Sheila Helpmann, Patricia Kennedy, Candy
Raymond, Hilary Ryan, Barry Humphries, John Waters, Sigrid Thornton, Kerry
Armstrong, Julia Blake
At
the time of The Getting of
Wisdom’s release, Bruce Beresford was best known for directing
muscular, rowdy entertainments like The
Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, and Don’s
Party. The latter film, adapting to the screen a play by
Australia’s premier playwright David Williamson, was a step towards
respectability for Beresford after his near professional ostracization
following the Barry McKenzie films,
and he was awarded a 1977 Best Director AFI Award for his efforts. The Getting of Wisdom seems
an even more decisive step towards respectability, courting association with
the dominant commercial aesthetics of the Australian New Wave: indeed, with its
period setting, girls boarding school location, and literary origins (based on
Henry Handel Richardson’s 1910 novel), it’s immediately evocative in its
surface details of Peter Weir’s Picnic
at Hanging Rock, released two years earlier and likewise set in
Victoria at the tail end of Queen Victoria’s reign. However, The Getting of Wisdom’s a
lighter yet more full-bodied blend than Weir’s artful, enigmatic melodrama. And
while its focus on a young woman protagonist and feminine milieu outwardly
suggests a significant departure from his earlier work, in its focus on culture
clash the film is consistent with not only Beresford’s prior films but also
subsequent ones like Breaker
Morant and The Club.
From
her arrival at an exclusive girls boarding school in Melbourne, Laura Tweedle
Rambotham (Susannah Fowle) sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb: she’s
oddly dressed, country-reared, shorter in stature and more awkward than her
catty and affluent peers. With her individualist personality and artistic
temperament, Laura struggles to fit into the regimented institution and its
elitist cliques, but finds her footing over the course of the film. The title
of the film is somewhat ironic and refreshingly fluid in its definition of
wisdom: Laura matures, but lies, cheats, gloats, conforms, and hurts others
along the way. In other words, she gains wisdom, but it’s a bit of a wash.
In
his published journals Josh
Hartnett definitely wants to do this… True stories from a life in the screen
trade, director Beresford rates Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies, Driving Miss Daisy, and Black Robe as his best
films, but professes a soft spot for The
Getting of Wisdom (p. 58). It’s a well-deserved soft spot, and
as intimated above, The
Getting of Wisdom is an earthier, funnier affair than its
decorous exterior and heritage film patina suggest, with the filmmakers milking
fish out of water comedy from Laura’s fumbling transition into her new
environment and subsequent, more mercenary pursuits. There’s shared DNA between
the film and other Australian films about adolescents and their schooldays
experiences; not only the aforementioned Picnic at Hanging Rock, but also The Devil’s Playground (a
more earnest male variant on The
Getting of Wisdom set in a Catholic seminary), Looking for Alibrandi (a
contemporary take on class and culture clash centred on another outsider
protagonist at an elite school), and Puberty
Blues (another Beresford adaptation of another Australian
fiction staple, updating the themes explored in The Getting of Wisdom to
modern beach culture).
The
Getting of Wisdom also shares some DNA with My Brilliant Career, both film and book, and those
familiar with that story – set in the same era and published 10 years
before The Getting of
Wisdom, but filmed two years later – will recognise some of
its protagonist Sybylla’s traits in Laura, who’s similarly whip-smart and
idiosyncratic. But the younger Laura is also (mostly) more moderate in
temperament, craves acceptance and affirmation, and is willing to compromise
her ideals somewhat to attain them. Susannah Fowle delivers an authentic
performance in the role, capturing some of the precociousness, vehemence, and
quixotic conviction of adolescents in general and Laura in particular. While
Beresford was seemingly going respectable with the film, he brought along some
of his Barry McKenzie allies,
including Barry Humphries, delivering a suitably mannered performance as the
school’s principal. The ranks of staff and students are filled out with both
recognisable faces (e.g. Sigrid Thornton, Kerry Armstrong) and unknown ones who
do nice work across the board, and John Waters is fun as a dishy but
cantankerous pastor. The film is as polished and burnished as the best of the
Australian New Wave’s heritage film cycle – cinematographer Don McAlpine and
costume designer Anna Senior also worked their magic on My Brilliant Career, while
production designer John Stoddart later worked on Careful, He Might Hear You – but also serves as a reminder that those classic period
films, branded with faintly damning praise by Pauline Kael for their “Seal of
Good Housekeeping” and being “safe to take a girl on a date to”, could be
slyer and more playful than their embroidered surfaces suggest…
Mao's Last Dancer
Stars: Chi Cao, Bruce Greenwood, Amanda Schull, Kyle MacLachlan,
Joan Chen, Jack Thompson
Mao’s
Last Dancer,
produced over 30 years after The
Getting of Wisdom, is another period-set coming of age film, albeit
featuring a male protagonist, unfolding across a larger canvas, and based on
true events. Set mainly in the 1970s and 80s, the film centres on Li Cunxin
(played at various ages by Wen Bin Huang, Chengwu Guo, and predominantly Chi
Cao), who was recruited at age eleven to learn and dance ballet for communist
China. American dance luminary Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood) takes a liking
to the dancer, now a young man, on a visit to China and invites Li to Houston
to study with his company for a season. The first half of the film alternates
between Lee’s training in communist China in the 1970s and experiences in
capitalist America in the 1980s, culminating in his painful defection from
country and family. The second half chronicles Li’s subsequent struggles and
triumphs.
I’ve talked from time to time about
Australian-international co-productions. Noteworthy recent films that fall into
this category include Hacksaw
Ridge, The Great
Gatsby, and Mad
Max: Fury Road: films by Australian filmmakers made in Australia
and/or with significant Australian resourcing and funding. These films expand
the parameters of what constitutes an Australian film, but often contain
minimal outwardly Australian content. Bruce Beresford has made a couple of
these films, Black Robe and Paradise Road, but Mao’s Last Dancer is a curious
case: its funding was completely Australian and so were its key creatives –
Beresford, producer Jane Scott, and writer Jan Sardi (adapting Cunxin’s
memoirs) – but its subject matter is foreign (although its ‘subject’, Li, now
resides in Australia) and the drama transpires entirely in China and the US
(though some of the film was shot in Sydney). The film was not a blockbuster
of The Great Gatsby or Fury Road proportions, but
it was a success and currently ranks 18th on the list of the most successful Australian films at the local box office (albeit not quite
profitable enough theatrically to recoup its outlay).
Early
stretches of the film contrasting Li’s impoverished upbringing & harsh
training in communist China and his more liberated experiences as a visitor to
America evoke Oliver Stone’s Heaven
and Earth and its similar scenes depicting an Asian
immigrant’s initial immersion into American excess. But Beresford’s touch is
altogether lighter than Stone’s, much to the film’s benefit. There’s much in
the film’s drama and politics that a heavy-handed or unsubtle filmmaker could
sink their teeth into, in turn sinking the film. But Mao’s Last Dancer avoids
the temptation of caricature and the trap of unnecessary preaching, instead
letting the material and human drama speak for itself. Beresford’s direction is
classical and unshowy, and he elucidates a solid performance from Cao, tasked
with the difficult demands of both dancing and acting, as well as sympathetic
supporting turns from Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan as Li’s lawyer, and Amanda
Schull as his first American wife. The staging of the film’s ballet
performances is also impressive. I’ve written previously about the clarity,
geography, and storytelling in the football set pieces in Beresford’s The Club,
and the ballet scenes here possess similar qualities. Shot predominantly from
the theatre audience’s vantage point in long and medium-to-long shots, both the
balletic athleticism of the dancers and the moving parts of the surrounding
theatrical mis en scene are
captured, and I suspect Beresford’s own experiences directing opera figure in
here, with the sequences combining both a stage director’s eye for filling the
proscenium arch and a film director’s eye for capturing key action and motion.
Mao’s
Last Dancer’s
depiction of Li’s initiation into a wider world provides an international
variant on Laura’s rites of passage in The
Getting of Wisdom, and also serves as a fitting bookend to its
director’s own professional arc since The
Getting of Wisdom. Like Li, director Beresford went from promising
local talent to internationally respected artist in the space between these two
films, helming both Oscar winning (Driving
Miss Daisy) and nominated (Tender
Mercies) films as well as a smattering of humbling critical and/or
commercial duds. As an entirely locally funded film with international subject
matter, Mao’s Last Dancer is
both a homecoming tale and a story and product of global artistry. It’s quietly
compelling work from an assured filmmaking hand.
Ben Kooyman