Cirrus@Austlit

The disintegration of between-the-wars life as shown through the crumbling relationships between three lovers as their Parisian life disintegrates with the coming of the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

'The Engagement is a complex and fascinating love story set in contemporary London. Dario is a mysterious motorbike courier who falls in love with a girl who is engaged to be married, but he cannot escape his horrifying experiences as a Serb paramilitary in the Bosnian war.'

Source:

British Council's British Films Directory (http://film.britishcouncil.org/the-engagement). (Sighted: 25/9/2014)

An exhausted and somewhat pill-dependent model finds herself incarcerated in a remote household by an acquaintance of her boyfriend's.

An unfaithful playwright takes his new leading man up on an offer: the leading man will seduce the playwright's wife, leaving the playwright free to pursue his passionate affair with his devoted leading actress. At first, the solution seems ideal, but the playwright soon becomes jealous of the leading man's success, not only in seducing the playwright's wife, but also in charming his castmates.

Set in the 1930s, Sirens explores the world of controversial Australian painter Norman Lindsay. Scandalised by a provocative series of Lindsay paintings, the Anglican Church sends young clergyman Anthony Campion and his wife Estella to take up a new parish in the country west of Sydney. Newly arrived in the country from England, the couple stop en route at Lindsay's house in the Blue Mountains, where Campion tries to persuade the artist to withdraw an etching from a coming international exhibition. Three young models (Sheela, Prue and Giddy) are currently staying on the property. Under their sensual influence, Estella feels increasingly estranged from her husband as he tries vainly to convince Lindsay to withdraw the offending picture from the exhibition. Like Giddy, Estella is beguiled by a tall, striking-looking man who lives in the bush nearby. Her dreams intensify, and she reaches a crisis that threatens her self-respect and her marriage.

Wide Sargasso Sea is based on the 1966 postcolonial novel of the same name by Dominican-born author Jean Rhys. As with many postcolonial works, it deals with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation.

The novel is essentially a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), telling the story of the first Mrs Rochester, a white Creole heiress caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans. Antoinette is a young female landowner who marries an Englishman (newly arrived in Jamaica) to avoid losing her property. All seems perfect, love arises, and happiness is on the way, but she is hiding an old secret regarding her childhood and her mother. The secret slowly begins to erode this perfect relationship and the young lovers are swept into a menage of black magic and erotic obsession that spirals into a climax of seduction, betrayal, and ultimately revenge.

Set in 1965, Flirting is the sequel to The Year My Voice Broke. Danny Embling is now seventeen and a full-time boarder at St Alban's College. Although Danny's stutter and unsportsmanlike physique make him an object of derision to many of his fellow students, his life isn't all bad: he has a perfect view of Circester College, his college's sister school, from his dormitory window. The narrative follows his friendship with Thandiwe Adjewa, the daughter of an African Nationalist on an academic post in Canberra and a student at Circester. Danny and Thandiwe become kindred spirits, lovers, and problems for their teachers, whose methods of maintaining control are long detention sessions and a good thrashing with the cane. The only support they receive is from Nicola Radcliffe, Circhester's head prefect, who is sympathetic to their plight.

'Biographical film of Damien Parer, newsman at the front in New Guinea during World War II.'

Source: Screen Australia. (Sighted: 20/5/2014)

Historical mini-series following a single family through eight years of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War: Douglas Goddard, a senior public servant working in Canberra; his dillusioned wife Evelyn; his son Phil, who is first conscripted to Vietnam and then returns as a regular soldier; and his daughter Megan, whose love for the son of a migrant worker leads her to Sydney and the anti-Vietnam movement.

Moran argues, in his Guide to Australian TV Series, that 'Vietnam has a wonderful complexity, majesty and sweep in its treatment of the years 1964-72'. While praising the compexity and elegiac nature of the program's treatment of inter-personal relationships, he adds,

The sweep of Vietnam is equally impressive -- the ability to narratively marshall a long series of events into a chain that connects history and the personal, a chain that begins in 1964 behind closed doors but increasingly could not be contained there, bursting out into the public arena of the media, the streets, the judges and finally the ballot box. And equally, Vietnam is a majestic document that fills an important space in the Laborist view of Australian politics created by the mini-series in the 1980s.

The mini series enjoyed enormous popularity when it was screened on Australian television.

A coming-of-age story, The Year My Voice Broke is set in a New South Wales country town in 1963. Fifteen-year-old Danny Embling's life is complex. Not only does he have to deal with teenage development, death, and departure, but his evolving relationship with a girl called Freya also begins to reveal the town's deepest secrets.

Room to Move is a story about an unlikely friendship between two girls: one a sporting champion, the other a dancer and an outsider. Carol is a top runner with great potential, and her father runs her training program day and night. When the punk-influenced Angie arrives at the school, the two become friends. They give each other lots of support and get up to things that Carol has desired but never had the courage to do, including learning how to dance. She begins to rebel, but an all-important race is coming up. Carol has to make a very important choice.

(Source: Australian Screen)

Four teenagers, two male and two female, spend one night and next morning together in the Sydney Opera House--while outside, the world becomes a wasteland, as nuclear war breaks out in Eastern Europe. The film leave the question of Sydney's destruction ambivalent, but does suggest a bleak outcome with the destruction of Pine Gap.

Journalist Peter Reeves (John Bell) takes his wife Jo (Helen Morse) to the Far East. There they meet Morgan Keefe (Bryan Brown), an ex-pat Aussie who owns a sleazy bar/nightspot called 'The Koala Klub'. After renewing their romance, Jo seeks Morgan's help when her husband is persecuted by the military regime for his investigations.

'Lou, a prostitute, meets Rob, a bookstore owner, when he investigates the suicide of an old girlfriend from his radical activist student days. She also encounters Rob's wife, Gretel, and is shocked by their 'swinging' lifestyle in which each partner casually takes lovers.'

Source: Screen Australia.

Based on Jack Hibberd's popular comedic play and set in the small rural Victorian township of Dimboola, the story takes place in the three days leading up to the marriage of locals Maureen Delaney and Morrie McAdam. Although the film adaptation contains much that is in the original play, it also allows the narrative to move beyond the confines of the single stage setting. Framed around a visiting English journalist who has arrived in the town to study the ways of the 'natives,' the story offers up a variety of images and situations that allow the apparently dim-witted Aussies blokes to do typically ratbag and oddball things with and to each other, usually while knocking back another 'tinnie' or trying to crack onto a sheila.

The dramatic action sees, for example, Morrie undergo the rigours of the shearing-shed bucks party. Amid the booze, obscenities, and fist fights arrives Angelique, a stripper who'll do more than just strip--if the price is right! Complications arise when Dangles, the best man, delivers incriminating photographs of Morrie and Angelique to Maureen, and the mayhem worsens when Morrie's mother reveals that the future bride and groom could actually be first cousins because of a pre-marital fling!

According to a contemporary review:

Carrie (Kim Krejus) and Jeannie (Sonia Peat) have fled a corrective institution and must keep low profiles. Their experience has sharpened them to the needs of life in a harsh society, relying on wit and bravado to survive, Tom (Ian Gilmour) and Serge (Sergio Frazzetti), from a rural background, have not yet lost their innocence or acquired the toughness of the city-bred guys. The four try to make the best life they can together in their near impossible economic circumstances. On the way, they discover something special in the relationships that none of them has previously known.

The review argues that:

'What Duigan's film does is to convert these generalisations into realities.

'It gives us much more positive picture of what it is like to have to shoplift to fill your belly and avoid public nudity, to live in an urban cave in an abandoned warehouse beside which shunting trains provide an incessant accompaniment, to search without success for a job, to wait at home while your girl entertains lonely men for cash at a swank hotel, to live in a world without hope and to accept it because you don't know how to complain effectively. The film is grossly political without being polemical about it, yet in spite of its innate quality of waiting for the next heartbreak, warm and strangely comforting.

Source:

'"Mouth to Mouth" Converts Generalisations into Realities', Canberra Times, 29 September 1978, p.10.