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The ties that bind: Puberty Blues (1981), My Year Without Sex (2009), Floating Life (1996)

 

Puberty Blues (1981) was Bruce Beresford’s follow-up to Breaker Morant and The Club. All three films anthropologically probe into cultural milieus with built-in hierarchies, rivalries, vocabularies, tribal rituals, and ingrained injustices—the military, professional sport, and high school—although Puberty Blues is distinguished from the other pair by its adolescent and female protagnists.

The film provides a time capsule of Cronulla and surrounds in the early 1980s, capturing the golden sands and persons occupying them in their hazy, sun-scorched glory, as well as capturing the rotten gender and social pecking orders that keep down underdog protagonists Debbie and Sue (Nell Schofield and Jad Capelja, both naturalistic and engaging) until they take up surfing at film’s end. Cinematographer Donald McAlpine shot all three consecutive films for Beresford, and here shoots the surfing action with the same cleanness as The Club’s impressive football scenes.   

Beresford taking on this material was not dissimilar to Francis Ford Coppola taking on The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. In both instances, fortysomething leading directors of their respective industries adapted young adult novels drawn from the teenage experiences of just-out-of-their-teens women authors: SE Hinton in the case of the Coppola films, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey here (their work adapted to screen by Margaret Kelly, predominantly a TV writer). Beresford’s film is less arch and overwrought, more slice-of-life than Coppola’s, but like his American counterpart he's sympathetic to his teen protagonists’ trials and tribulations, chronicling them without bemusement or nostalgia. Alongside The Year My Voice Broke and Looking for Alibrandi, Puberty Blues is one of the very best Australian films about teenage years.

Sex, or “roots” as the film colloquially calls it, is foregrounded throughout Puberty Blues, as a rite of passage, social currency, and power broker. While it’s foregrounded in the title of My Year Without Sex (2009), it’s not as prominent in the film itself. The film is written and directed by the late Sarah Watt, who previously helmed the very fine Look Both Ways, which likewise dealt with spectre of illness and death and decay over relationships. Sex is likewise a spectre in My Year Without Sex, romantic and relational and culturally pervasive, but withheld from protagonists Ross and Natalie (Matt Day and Sacha Horler, both excellent) as Natalie recovers from a brain aneurism. Look Both Ways and My Year Without Sex share thematic and stylistic DNA, but differ in scope: the latter focuses squarely on a single family (with Jonathan Segat and Portia Bradley also excellent as Ross and Natalie's children) as opposed to a sprawling ensemble, and unfolds over a year—much like Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays—instead of a single weekend. Hence there is contraction of focus but expansion of canvas, and while I have a slight preference for Watt’s earlier film, I appreciated My Year Without Sex’s more lived-in texture and domestic humour.

Floating Life (1996) is also family-centred, but against a global canvas. Like The Home Song Stories, its focus is Chinese diaspora, here depicting one fragmented family across continents, including uptight and controlling Bing (Annie Yip), her parents (Edwin Pang, Cecilia Fong Sing Lee) and younger brothers (Toby Wong, Toby Chan) in Australia; her sister Yen (Annette Shun Wah) and her family in Germany; and dissolute brother Gar Ming (Anthony Wong) in Hong Kong. Humorous vignettes about culture clash give way to drama and melancholy as the film unfolds and new dimensions to initially one-dimensional characters are gradually revealed.

Macau-born director Clara Law emerged during the Hong Kong Second Wave, the pool of talent that also produced Wong Kar-Wai. Law relocated to Australia with her co-writer Eddie Fong, and Floating Life is no doubt infused with the collaborators’ own sense of dislocation. The gifted cinematographer Dion Beebe—later a collaborator with Michael Mann, Jane Campion, and Rob Marshall—was born and later learned his trade in Australia, but was predominantly raised in South Africa, so likewise elucidates the alien quality (to the foreign eye) of familiar Australian locales.

The stakes of Floating Life are entirely relational rather than situational—despite percolating domestic tensions, Bing’s relatively affluent parents can buy their own home at any point—and as a viewer I questioned little things throughout, like the significant age gulf between the elderly parents and their adolescent sons, or mature adults who had moved country being bamboozled by a small yapping dog in the street. But there is a dreamy quality to the film, implicit in its title, and such quibbles can be swept under the film’s quasi-dream logic.

Ben 

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