16
Ampersand
Slay June, 1980
My Brilliant Career, starring Judy Davis
and Sam Neill; written by Eleanor Witcombe
from the novel by Miles Franklin; produced by
Margaret Fink; directed by Gillian
Armstrong.
Sybilla Melvyn, eldest daughter of a care
less farmer and his well-born, once
beautiful wife, is determined to be
somebody a singer, a pianist, a
writer to have, as she writes in her
schoolgirl notebook, a brilliant career. But
young women in turn-of-the-century Au
stralia were fated for marriage and a baby
a year or a menial job like teaching other
farmers' children to read and write, ,
Sybilla wins a reprieve from teaching
when her grandmother invites her to
while away the summer in relative splen
dor, during which time Sybilla sull dreams
of a career, but she does so in comfort: new
clothes, dances, parties, her rough hands
soaKed in lemon water, her hair brushed
by a maid. And in the course of this idyll
Sybilla falls in love with Harry Beecham
(Sam Neill), the young, handsome planta
tion owner neighbor who at first appears
unattainable but soon becomes intensely
attracted to her. The underlying sexual
tension between them is frustrating and
compelling.
Uncertain of her looks and social graces
throughout most of the film, growing up
homely in the shadow of a beautiful
mother (everyone remarks how Sybilla
didn't get her mother's looks; "pity") she is
nevertheless quite certain what she doesn't
want. When she is forced to return to her
family, Beecham's aunt remarks that life
will indeed be dull without Sybilla. She
starts out the ugly duckling and ends up a
graceful, independent swan; actress Judy
Davis makes us believe every minute. With
her broad, freckled face, masses of un
tamed hair and a defiance born of a secret
conviction that she deserves more from
life than she's getting while at the same
time believing that she is clumsy and un
attractive and undeserving Davis makes
Sybilla genuine, likeable, awesome and
heroic.
Written, produced and directed by
women, based on the book (perhaps au
tobiographical) by Miles Franklin (actually
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin; she was
16 when she wrote My Brilliant Career, 22
when it was published in 1901), this film is
no shrill polemic for feminism, but it is
firm and true, honest and fine and gentle
and every bit as brilliant as a young school
girl's dreams. .
There are very few films I ever want to
recommend without reservation; this is
one of them. See it. If it means driving 60
miles in hard weather and a weak car, see
it.
Judith Sims
HIDE In PLAIN SIGHT, starring James Caan,
Jill Eikenberry, Robert Viharo; written by
Spencer Eastman; produced by Robert
Christiansen & Rick Rosenberg; directed by
James Caan.
Iri 1967, a Buffalo factory laborer sud
denly found his two children incom
municado after the Justice Department
relocated their mother and new step
father, a mafioso turner of state's evidence,
to another, unspecified part of the country.
In Hide in Plain Sight James Caan por
trays the bereaved father, Thomas
Hacklin, as stolidly as someone who s just
lost a new pair of bowling shoes, and not
had the fruit of his loins wrenched from
his loving grasp. As Hacklin attempts to
find his children, officious bureaucrats
snub him at every turn, members of Con
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C 11 3
Davis & Neill: brilliant as a schoolgirl's dreams
gress lie to him, a contumelious lawyer
humiliates him, and the tire factory in
which his family has forty-four years of
combined service sacks him; we keep
waiting indeed, hoping for him to
explode, but he never does, a couple of
halfhearted token acts of vengeance not
withstanding. Through all of it, Caan ap
pears confused rather than infuriated,
perturbed rather than anguished.
Confounding our expectations, he's in
finitely more audacious behind the camera
in this, his debut as a director. A couple of
times as when, at the end of the scene in
which his ex-wife informs him that she's
married the hoodlum paramour she'd
earlier promised to give up, the camera
pulls bacit across the street and traffic
noise drowns out the dialogue he seems
to be trying very much too hard, for the
movement maK.es no sense of any Kind.
Elsewhere, though, he accomplishes at
least one striking juxtaposition when he
cuts from a close-up of the blissful face of
the schoqheacher with whom Hacklin's
fallen in love to a close-up of his harried
ex-wife's face as she whispers through a
prison window to her mobster beau in
such a way that one womans seems to be
come the other.
Aside from the generally listless per
formances, this picture is also impaired by
a screenplay which assumes that the kids'
feelings about being taken away from their
father are of no interest. Between the time
that they disappear and their reunion with
Hacklin in the film's one emotionally
charged scene outside an Albuquerque
diner, we glimpse them but once, and then
only very briefly.
Say what you will about Walking Tall
having been lurid and manipulative the
remarkably bloodless and untouching
Hide in Plain Sight would be ten times the
film it is if it had a hundredth the passion
and action of the former.
John Mendelssohn
laborator on the Annie Hall.Manhattan and
Sleeper scripts, Marshall Brickman now
begins his solo director-writer career with
Simon, starring his old pal (they were once
members of a folksinging group, the Tar-
riers), Alan Arum. Predictably, many cri
tics have faulted Brickman because he isn't
Allen or because there are too many
similarities, or not enough similarities. But
never mind all that.
Arkin plays a university professor kid
naped by a mischievous, omnipotent
"think tank" group of weirdo intellectual
scientists-philosophers; to satisfy their
twisted whim, Arkin is brainwashed into
thinking he's an alien.In the process Arkin
gets a showstopping routine reenacting
several million years of biological history,
starting out as a plankton and evolving
quickly through upright man (with sly-
ape-cr-bone homage to 2001 ).
Brickman manages to combine sweet
optimisim with intellectual cynicism, all
the while taking potshots at the endless
petty annoyances that make our lives so
dreary and dreadful: Muzak, bad drivers,
those strips of paper wrapped around
motel toilet seats. Brickman also hits big
ger targets, like the think tank itself (this
one headed by Austin Pendleton,
Machiavelli with an overbite and a leather
jacKet), television, academia and the mili
tary. And it has a nice happy ending. Enjoy.
Judith Sims
SIMON, starring Alan Arkin, Madeline Kahn,
Austin Pendleton; written by Marshall
Brickman; produced by Martin Bregman;
directed byBrickman.
-1 Famous heretofore as Woody Allen's col-
NlJINSKY, with Alan Bates, Ceorge de la Pena
and Leslie Browne; written by Hugh Wheeler;
directed by Herbert Ross.
After the success of The Turning Point, di
rector Herbert Ross and his producer-
wife, the former ballerina Nora Kaye, were
able to raise money from a major studio to'
film a biography on Vaslav Nijinsky. But
whereas Point was as wholesome as Ameri
can corn bread, Nijinsky is as decadent as a
hothouse truffle.
In many ways Nijinsky is The Red Shoes
without the censorship which forced the
impresario in the latter movie to drive a
ballerina to her death instead of a danseur.
In 1948 overt homosexuality was too scan
dalous for movies, but that's certainly not
the case in 1980. But instead of using the
freedom to paint a valid, complex picture
of Nijinsky and his need and love for both
Serge Diaghuev and Romola de Pulsky, this
movie reduces these three complicated
people to cardboard puppets.
Only Diaghilev fares well, perhaps be
cause Alan Bates is skilled enough to play-
between the simplistic lines, but George de
la Pena as Nijinsky and Leslie Browne as
Romola are both so outclassed by Bates I
wanted to tell Bates to stop hurting the
children. There can t be a tug-of-war for
the body and soul of one man when the
two opposing sides (Romola and
Diaghilev) are so ill-matched.
Even without this emotional complexity.
Nijinsky might have worked visually if Ross
had been able to capture a sense of the
times. Diaghilev's band of artists from
the painter Leon Bakst to the composer
Igor StravinsKi were turning the art
world upside down, but that revolution is
missing. We never understand how these
people were living on the edge of time and
creating a whole new language that is still
spoKen in todays music and dance world.
The best thing that can be said about
Nijinsky is that it's beautifully art directed,
but this is hardly sufficient. For a film
about passion, obsession, creation, mad
ness and death, Nijinsky is painfully flat.
Where is the flamboyant outragcousness
of Ken Russell when we need it?
Jacoba Atlas
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A SIMPLE STORY, starring Romy Schneider,
Claude Brasseur.and Bruno Cremer; directed
by Claude sautet.
Marie (Romy Schneider) is Sautet's
almost-40 heroine, and between her preg
nancy that opens the film and a different
pregnancy of hers that closes it, nothing
much of dramatic import occurs. And
that's as it should be, for this is a slicc-of-life
film that intentionally skims life's more
mundane facets; in style, pace, and mood
Story is like a grown-up Peppermint Soda.
Mane drops her current lover, dallies with
her former husband, tries to help a suici
dal friend, and eats and drinks a good deal
with an attractive group of friends all in
all, not bad company for two hours.
Robert L. Uebman
M I SC F.LLA N FOL'S MlSFRI FS
Die Laughing is so wretchedly execrable, so
thoroughly unamusing, so disastrously
devoid of charm one wonders who was
foolish enough to pay for this nonsense.
Jon Peters, the one who lives with
Streisand, is the executive producer; Rol
bie Benson is the star, the co-writer, the
co-producer and the songwriter, and what
started out as a disarmingly sincere young
man inOn on One has turned into a cheap,
sleazo trickster who should think seriously
about giving up show business for some
tiling worthwhile, like pounding sand in
ratholes.
A Small Circle of Friends has already been
rightly panned in several national mag,
but I feel compelled to add one more nail
to the coffin. For those interested in the
Sixties, see instead The War at Home, a
documentary (featured in a recent Am
persand) that far outstrips Smalt Circle in
emotion, nostalgia and political insight.
The Solar Film last eight minute and
wouldn't earn much more than a cursory
glance if Robert Redford's name weren't at
the top as executive producer. It's a la
mentably jejune look at the energy crisis
and the lucky old sun, and its about as in
formative a a Dick and Jane reader.
Judith Sims