Published 2016 on Down Under Flix
Director: Gillian Armstrong
Stars: Jo Kennedy, Ross O’Donovan
Critic
Pauline Kael once declared that the label ‘Made in Australia’ “is almost like a
Seal of Good Housekeeping on a film. If a young man goes out on a date, it is
safe to take a girl to an Australian film”. Kael was clearly not
describing The Adventures of
Barry McKenzie, but rather the period flicks that constituted much
of the Australian New Wave, like Caddie, The Picture Show Man, The Getting of Wisdom, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, We of the Never Never, and so
on. Gillian Armstrong’s My
Brilliant Career is another film of that vintage, albeit with
a feminist restlessness befitting its source material under its finely
burnished exterior.
With
her 1982 sophomore feature Starstruck,
Armstrong trades big dresses for big hair, lace for shiny leggings, and Good
Housekeeping for amiable pop-punk. As the director recalled, “I didn’t want to
make another period picture about a woman fighting for her identity… I wanted
to do something completely different” (David Stratton’s The Avocado Plantation, p.
147). But while the films appear as dissimilar as apples and oranges on first
glance, Starstruck’s
lead character Jackie is restless and hungry for fame and fortune in much the
same way Career’s
Sybylla hungers for her autonomy. And like Career, Starstruck is
very much a woman’s story, consolidating a preoccupation that would pervade
Armstrong’s whole career, as noted in my review of The Last Days of Chez Nous.
Jackie
(Jo Kennedy) is an ingénue songstress who lives and works at her mother’s bar
under Sydney Harbour Bridge. Her cousin Angus (Ross O’Donovan) has a vested
interest in her success, and engineers a stunt that thrusts her into the media
spotlight. She comes to the attention of producer Terry (John O’May) who casts
her on his talent show, but success comes with artistic compromise as well as a
toll on her boyfriend, bandmates, family and the family business.
One
of the ongoing pleasures of this site is seeing how each week’s film bounces
off of the previous week’s, and there are interesting parallels between Starstruck and last week's offering The Time Guardian. Both films endured a
difficult production process, both are hybrid movies made with tax incentives
merging an Australian setting to a predominantly American genre, and both share
that strange, endearing dissonance that happen when American genre tropes brush
up against Australian accents and locales (Sydney’s Harbour Bridge and Opera
House and Bondi Pavillion all figure prominently). While Australia has produced
a solid number of film musicals over the years, some lucrative – Moulin Rouge, Bran Nue Dae, The Sapphires – and some
curiosities – One Night the
Moon, Stunt Rock, The Return of Captain Invincible –
the genre remains something of a novelty in local film. In Starstruck’s musical numbers,
Armstrong combines the grammar and artifice of old school Hollywood musicals
with the burgeoning MTV music video aesthetic – Australian director Russell
Mulcahy’s clip for ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ launched that institution the
year before – whilst simultaneously deflating the genre’s trappings with some
strategically placed homegrown dinky-ness and dorkiness.
While
Jackie is a punk chick, she’s punk in the poppy, discotheque Deborah Harry vein
rather than, say, the Sid Vicious vein. Given the Australian context, that
pop/disco leaning’s not too surprising: after all, Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert helped bolster ABBA’s posthumous fortunes, and The
Village People’s movie Can’t
Stop the Music found its greatest success down under (and
there’s a scene in Starstruck that
would be very at home in the latter). As indicated above, there’s an umbilical
cord stretching from My
Brilliant Career’s Sybylla to Jackie, with both young women
restless and yearning for more, albeit in different eras and contexts. Jackie
is Sybylla dizzy on a whole lot of sugar and red cordial, and Jo Kennedy gives an
energetic and enjoyable performance. Ross O’Donovan is also fun, if broad, as
her wheeler & dealer younger cousin.
Starstruck is
silly, breezy, earthy, spunky, and very likeable.
Ben Kooyman