Chapter Two:
Flirting
By Brett Beach
March 12, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Seeing Mirren in the audience at the Oscars, looking hotter at 64 than she did five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago (you get the picture) allows me to trot out one of my personal anecdotal chestnuts. Twelve years and several lifetimes ago, I was copy editor, listings editor and writer/reviewer for a cable listings magazine with one of its two offices located in Portland. The dream gig lasted but a year as TV Guide, which was making its way into the large digest format, eventually bought us out. However, it was great fun to be in my early twenties and interviewing everyone from David Byrne to Jon Stewart, Regis Philbin to Paul Sorvino over the phone, all of them kindly enough to put up with my haphazard interviewing style and occasional breathless idol worship. I interviewed Mirren in connection with her made-for-cable movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (for which she eventually won an Emmy). I mentioned that I loved her in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (alternate viewing suggestion #1 this week) and that I had viewed it on its initial video release in 1990 at the ripe old age of 14.
"You were much too young to see that then. You naughty little boy," she teased and the wink in her voice was not hard to miss.
"Oh, but it's okay," I sputtered in reply, "My parents watched it with me."
Earlier this week at the public library, I fortuitously came across Age of Consent (alternate viewing choice #2) on the shelf, one of the many of hundreds of films I grew up reading the capsule review of in Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide and wondering when it would become available on home video so I could see it. Directed by British filmmaker Michael Powell - his last full-length feature - in 1969, it's a portrait of an aging artist (James Mason) who takes flight to a remote Australian island to recharge his dormant talent and winds up with an unlikely muse, a young tomboyish lass more at home catching crab and fish with her bare hands than posing on the sand or in the surf.
Mirren, in her film debut, plays the young lady and it's mind-blowing to see her ("from the Royal Shakespeare Company" as her closing credit informs us) so young and yet so already confident and cocky, bold and emblazoned and holding her own in her scenes with Mason. Age of Consent is best when it is idyllic and erotic, frothy and sexy. However, there are terrible moments of comic relief, one unexpectedly bizarre death that you will cheer, and a curiously underwhelming ending, though it leads to a vividly perfect freeze-framed final shot. Age of Consent works best when considering Mason's artist as a stand-in for Powell and how his career was all but obliterated in the wake of his 1960 psychosexual thriller, Peeping Tom (a film which I with great fervor do not recommend at all).
Age of Consent, inspired by the 1935 autobiography of Australian artist Norman Lindsay, was sort of remade in 1994 as Sirens (alternate viewing choice #3), by Aussie director John Duigan. Sunny and sensual and good-natured and abundantly overflowing with nudity (of the male and female kind), it's a cinematic precursor to Viagra and was once aptly described as a skin flick for English lit majors. Sam Neill has the artist role, Hugh Grant is at the height of his mid-90s stammering/yammering wonderfulness and Elle Macpherson and Portia de Rossi are among the sometimes clothed, sometimes not, muses. Duigan had been working in the Australian film industry for over a decade before his 1987 semi-autobiographical tale The Year My Voice Broke received international notices.
Set in 1962 in New South Wales, it's a portrait of a love triangle of sorts with the sensitive Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) realizing his attraction to lifelong friend and fellow outcast Freya, even as she is becoming attracted to kind-hearted hooligan Trevor. Rewatching it (on VHS as it as never been released on a Region 1 DVD that I know of) it struck me how much it resembled the Corey Haim-Kerri Green-Charlie Sheen high school pic Lucas (alternate viewing choice #4) in its relationship dynamics. For all the emotionally authentic performances by the young cast, The Year My Voice Broke eventually succumbs to coming-of-age-itis and feels less like events are happening to Embling and more that they are happening to a character in a movie. Taylor is charmingly awkward in some moments while at other times coming on like a prototypical emo-rockabilly stalker, which, intriguingly, keeps him from being an entirely likable protagonist.
Duigan intended for Embling's story to continue in at least two other films but only one was ever made, 1990's Flirting. It's a case of a sequel doing considerably better than the first (with solid U.S. art-house distribution by Fine Line Features in 1992 and word-of-mouth driving the domestic gross to nearly $3 million) and of being more well known than the first film. Despite this, and a cast of fresh, soon–to-be-famous faces, Flirting has been out of print on DVD since its 2002 release, so grab it from Netflix if your local library branch or video outlet doesn't have it.
Set three years after The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting takes a subgenre of the coming-of-age-tale, the travails of life and love while at boarding school, and proceeds to become as specific and unique in what its characters experience (which of course increases the universality of its emotions) as My Voice wound up with an all-encompassing generic feeling. In describing its set-up, it seems almost impossible to imagine how Flirting doesn't succumb to the clichés of its genre. A checklist of key elements: An all-male school directly across a lake from an all-female school. Awkward mixer dances between the two institutions. Rugby matches. Cruel practical jokes. The gnawing pangs of an idealized first love. Repeated sneakings out and rowing across said lake for illicit liaisons with the opposite sex.
Nothing completely unexpected happens in Flirting. At times, it plays like a slightly sunnier gloss on the rueful experiences Morrissey described in The Smiths' classic song "The Headmaster Ritual." (The first sounds in Flirting are the cracks of swatch against skin as a succession of boys are reprimanded for the latest infraction they've committed.) What Duigan gets absolutely right in his construction and from Danny's narration (brief but important interjections just as in My Voice) is the avoidance of nostalgia for the era in and of itself. He doesn't treat these events as moments to be soundtracked with hit songs that do all the emotional work. There are choice tunes in Flirting (The Troggs "With a Girl Like You" being one) and they show up at the dances and in the rooms of the students but never, as Ebert once coined, for a Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude.
The characters and the performances are at the heart of the film and are so persuasive, so perfectly matched that they achieve the tricky task of defining what happens to them rather than plot points sweeping the characters along. Danny, again played by Taylor, has grown into his awkwardness and wears his outcast status like a badge of honor. He may have to suffer the indignities of boarding school life and receive teasing for his stutter but when he begins a romance with a new student at the girls' school, there is the undercurrent of awe from the other boys, never explicitly rendered by Duigan, because Danny is treading where they would all like to. Taylor's notes of wry amusement and quiet exasperation (it's hard to imagine Danny getting "worked up") even as he prepares to enter the boxing ring to defend his beloved's honor make him ingratiating and admirable.
Danny's attraction is to Thandiwe, born in Uganda but raised in London for part of her life and because of her nationality, an outcast in her own right. Duigan finds the perfect balance of their attraction to one another's mind/intellect (that most wonderful of erogenous zones) and their physical youthful lust for one another. Flirting is an appropriately chosen title because this isn't a sex comedy where everyone's getting laid (although Danny and Thandiwe are heading in that direction) but a tale of two people getting to know one another, falling into "love" (?) and deciding how to unravel together the mysteries of first base, second base, third base and what lies beyond.
Thandie Newton made her film debut as Thandiwe and is so perfect in and for the role that it makes me reflect on how there aren't enough good roles for an actress like her with stunning beauty but a refusal to buy too deeply into Hollywood formula filmmaking. Her most underrated performance remains as the title character Beloved in Jonathan Demme's criminally dismissed - by audiences, critics and awards groups - 1998 film adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel (alternate viewing choice #5). I thought it was the best film of its year.
Thandiwe is as headstrong and brash as Danny, inviting herself up to his room at one point, and as an audience, we yearn for them to be together. When the real world intrudes and forces them both to mature, threatening to make their time together brief, Duigan finds the right emotional notes to carry their story through to the end. As a writer-director, his career hits its commercial and critical strides in the mid 1990s with this, his adaptation of the Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sirens in quick succession and only seven films since then. Having seen so very few of his early films and not caring for much of what he helmed post-Sirens, I find it hard to judge if the Danny Embling films were anomalies in his career, life experiences that needed to be played out for closure, and the extremely quirky nature of his other projects (Lawn Dogs, The Leading Man, Molly) were more in line with his taste.
The DVD cover art for Flirting features third-billed Nicole Kidman front and center with a Photoshopped Thandie on the left "gazing" across at her and it's easy to imagine the folks at MGM taking the easy road for a few more rentals with the suggestion of lesbian trysting. If you're curious, there's none to be had here, folks, and frankly, although I can't believe I am saying this, Flirting is all the better for it. As baits and switch go, it's hardly the biggest swindler. That would be the video box for the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion (alternate viewing choice #6) which implied that this would be the bodice-ripperiest of all costume dramas and that the titular activity would be taking place (loudly) behind locked doors and not discreetly out in the open air of drawing rooms and parlors.
Kidman is a perfect supporting foil as Nicola, haughty and icy but not as chilly as she would like to let on. Nicola winds up being a confidant of sorts for Thandiwe and their scenes together are yet further examples of Duigan's unwillingness to let stereotypes and assumptions dictate the direction of his story. On a final note, look sharp for a young Naomi Watts, making her feature film debut here as well and reflect that it would be another ten years on before she would get her own breakout role.
Next time: One of the producers of both The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting is an Australian filmmaker who has helmed everything from post-apocalyptic action classics to disarming family tales. He has directed two (soon to be three) Chapter Twos and I'll be heading back to 1998 to take a look at one of them.