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Flirting (1991) and Blackrock (1997)

 

When I listed Australian sequels in my recent review of Wog Boy 2, I neglected to mention Flirting (1991), John Duigan’s follow-up to The Year My Voice Broke. Of its predecessor, I wrote in 2017:

 

Duigan’s film shares DNA with earlier Australian coming of age precursors like The Devil’s Playground and Puberty Blues, and casts a shadow over later period-set depictions of small town youth malaise like The Crossing, The Delinquents, and more recently Jasper Jones. There’s also a touch of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show in its portrait of a slowly dying town (situated off the highway and left to erode) with a cinema as its social hub. It’s a somewhat melancholic portrait of small town life and the people politics therein, but the natural environment surrounding the town is impressive and beautifully filmed by Geoff Burton … Noah Taylor and Loene Carmen, who would co-star again in The Nostradamus Kid and most recently Red Dog, do exceptional work in their lead roles. A scrawny young Taylor sells Danny’s youthful awkwardness and the chemical adolescent intensity and earnestness of his infatuation with Freya, while Carmen nails a character both flattened by and resilient against the slings and arrows of small town toxicity … The Year My Voice Broke is deservedly regarded as a classic: it’s a funny and thoughtful and pained portrait of growing pains framed through an empathetic adult lens.

 

I referred in that review to Flirting as a “sequel of sorts”, hedging my bets on a film I hadn’t seen, unsure of its exact relationship to The Year My Voice Broke. Having now seen Flirting, I can definitively call it a sequel: it not only reunites much of the original’s creative team—including writer-director Duigan, star Taylor, cinematographer Burton, producers George Miller, Terry Hayes and Doug Mitchell, and production designer Roger Ford—but follows its protagonist into new environs and thoughtfully extends and recontextualizes the original film's themes and concerns [1].

 

Set in 1965, three years after The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting transplants Noah Taylor’s Danny, now in his late teens, from his home town to the manicured grounds and regimented corridors of a preppy boarding school, and in doing so provides new relational and social politics for Danny to navigate. Also navigating said politics is a student from Uganda of mixed heritage enrolled at the neighboring girls college, Thandiwe (Thandie Newton), who Danny develops a relationship with. Gliding confidently across such politics is the queen bee prefect at the girls college, Nicola (Nicole Kidman). 

 

There’s little to fault in Flirting’s precise craft, especially its lush dialogue track and expressive sound design; in Duigan’s assured direction and perceptive writing, which like Puberty Blues respects and dignifies its teenage characters and their outsized emotions [2]; or the performances of its talented cast, especially Taylor and Newton, the latter making her feature debut. While it’s slightly distracting seeing Kidman, then in her early 20s, reverting to playing a teenager after breakout roles in Dead Calm as Sam Neill’s young wife and Days of Thunder as Tom Cruise’s young neurosurgeon, the characterization—statuesque and icy—is comfortably within her wheelhouse. 


 

The toxic side of Australian surf culture has been dramatized in several titles reviewed on DUF—most recently Puberty Blues, but also Liquid Bridge and Bondi Tsunami—but none to quite the same devastating effect as Blackrock (1997). Directed by actor Steven Vidler (The Home Song Stories) in his feature directing debut, the film charts the fallout of the horrific rape and murder of a teenage girl by surfers, focusing particularly on Jared (Laurence Breuls), who witnessed the event but did nothing, and his mother Diane (Linda Cropper). Breuls and Cropper are excellent, and the strong ensemble is populated with young emerging stars (including Heath Ledger, Jessica Napier, Rebecca Smart, Justine Clarke, Bojana Novakovic, and Essie Davis) and veteran character actors in their orbit (including David Field, John Howard, and Chris Haywood). 

 

Had I not known Blackrock was adapted from a play (by Nick Enright) I would not have suspected it watching the film unfold: the film feels thoroughly cinematic with its generally naturalistic performances, then-contemporary soundtrack, location shooting, and bleached visual aesthetic, only betraying its theatrical origins in its effective but stagey final scenes. Inspired by true events but largely a dramatization, the film was met with controversy during production and release; however, it strikes me as a compassionate and well-meaning film about communal trauma and guilt in the vein of Jindabyne, far from the work of a true crime hustler tragedian like Justin Kurzel. 

 

Ben

 

  

[1] The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting also follow in the footsteps of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II in their awards trajectory; just as Coppola’s films both won Best Picture Oscars, so too did Duigan’s win Best Picture AFI Awards.  


[2] The film also, like Cabaret, unfolds this relationship against the backdrop of escalating and encroaching political atrocity, there the rise of Nazism, here the offshore rise of Idi Amin in Uganda.  

 

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