moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks
Aborigines gained the right to vote in 1967, yet two years earlier life for Willie (McKenzie) looks positively radiant. He's a shy boy living in the idyllic pearling town of Broome, a boy hopelessly in love with the equally radiant Rosie (ARIA winning singer Jessica Mauboy). But if his mother is the cloud on his horizon (she sends him to study in Perth), Father Benedicitus (Geoffrey Rush), a vicious boarding school teacher, is the storm. Willie ups sticks and heads home to his waiting love, a long walk with vagabond 'Uncle' Tadpole (Dingo), an uptight German hippie and his garrelous girlfriend (Tom Budge and Missy Higgins). All the while, they sing a happy tune.
Adapting Jimmy Chi's 1989 musical, Perkins and screenwriter Reg Cribb have wandered into very peculiar territory indeed. Where the sublime Samson and Delilah shines an unapologetically bright light on the miserable plight of Aborigines, Bran Nue Dae seeks to jolly it up in the worst tradition of the dance hall. Humour, once a potent force for reflection, is simply forced and awkward, taking the sting out of any social commentary loitering from the original work. Musical number are strident, production is cluttered, performance running the gamut from confused to embarrassed. Dingo, himself prone to the occasional ham sandwich, pales against the porcine feasting of co-stars Rush and Budge. Subtlety is no-ones concern.
Any discussion about the sidelining of Aboriginal culture past or present is lost. In its place, Perkins throws herself at a cheery musical production that unshackled by irony reeks of a bad case of white guilt. There's so much in common with a poorly judged and lamely produced TV variety show that you keep looking for the face paint. A discordant and uncomfortable mess, Bran Nue Dae is as far from Perkins' stately Radiance as a film can be.
// COLIN FRASER
moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks