The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 353

CALENDAR MOVIES 1 DOWN UNDER FILM COMES OUT ON TOP BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN The center of vitality in film making seems to roam the world historically like the bouncing ball in those old sing-along shorts. It has never rolled far from Hollywood, but there have been blazing episodes of glory in postwar Italy, in postwar Britain (the Ealing comedies that eased the pain of shortages), in New Wave France, in Bergman's Sweden; much more recently in Germany, in Holland (which had nearly a dozen entries at the recent Filmex) and, very promisingly now, in Australia. Vitality and quantity are not necessarily identical. Canada has become a major production center; most of the work is aimed for the mainstream commercial market and not yet marked by daring. The Australians obviously have no wish to make films no one wants to see; they can spot a path to suicide.

But out of Australia in very recent times has come a series of artful and chance-taking movies, original and colorful. They manage to be distinctly Australian in themes and content, yet not provincial and with claims on the attention of audiences far from home. "The Last Wave," "The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith," "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "Newsfront" and others have had international praise and respectable if not yet blockbuster audiences. "My Brilliant Career," which follows "La Cage aux Folles" into the Music Hall Theatre in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, may have the most universal appeal of all the latter-day Australian films so far. From its charmingly sarcastic and self-indicting title to its resolute and courageous ending, "My Brilliant Career" is a fascinating and appealing work, beautifully written, photographed, directed and acted most notably by Judy Davis as its strong-willed teen-age heroine, whose dreams of independence and fulfillment create jarring conflicts with her family life and prospects in the Australian hinterland at the turn of the century.

The script is in the form of a visualizing of the journal kept by a 16-year-old girl in that distant time and, in fact, the film is based on the presumably autobiographical novel written by 16-year-old Miles Franklin and published in Glasgow in 1901. Franklin, who died in 1954, was so upset at the autobiographical interpretations of "My Brilliant Career" that she prevented a second edition for many years. She left Australia in 1904 and stayed away for more than a quarter-century, pausing in Chicago to help found the Women's Trade Union League, working in slum nurseries in England and writing always. There were nine other novels, none of which has had the enduring powers of "My Brilliant Career." It is, of course, a book and thus a movie that could have been set as validly in that period in Yorkshire or Vermont, Brittany, Nebraska, Saskatchewan or Sardinia. A young woman's anxieties about a future that appears likely to suffocate all her aspirations to individuality are universal.

The anxieties are, at that, not limited to women; James Joyce in a different mode and depth was addressing the same frustrations in On the next estate lives a devilishly handsome young chap (Sam Neill); and the development of their relationship is subtle and unpredictable, the more so because it goes against all our expectations that it (or he) will be the answer to a maiden's prayer. He might be, but evidently not this maiden's not at first, anyway. For "My Brilliant Career" is well ahead of its time in taking the view that a little security may be as dangerous as a little learning for a woman who wishes to be independent. Even now some viewers (women and men) may challenge the resolution, just as they doubted that any woman newly unmarried but in her right mind would leave Alan Bates to summer by himself in the North Woods. A somewhat more cynically informed generation might also inquire whether the drive for artistic expression and independence is not, in fact, a mask for a sexual unorthdoxy, either conscious or subconscious.

(I quickly add that the film is not about that; but, films give messages, intentionally and unintentionally.) However deep the psychological probing is meant to go, "My Brilliant Career" blooms with vitality and integrity and high craft. It bespeaks a climate of adventurous film making, which is exactly why film observers in so many countries look to the new Australian product with particular excitement, envy and admiration. Director Armstrong's well-disciplined film is intimate, unpretentious, quite funny, Dublin at nearly the same time. But "My Brilliant Career" is primarily a women's film in a double sense. It was produced by a woman Margaret Fink, written by a woman Eleanor Witcombe, directed by a woman Gillian Armstrong, and designed by a woman Luciana Arrig-hi.

As a final item of distinction about "My Brilliant Career," it is rated but this time the is as in Grown-ups. It is in that sense the kind of film nobody is said to be making anymore handling the mature theme of girl becoming woman but without need of higher-rated visuals or language. Judy Davis as Sybylla Melvyn is born into a hot, dusty, economically perilous ranch life 2V6-days' hard ride from nowhere. The parlor gentility, imported or fetched from England as remembrance of things past, is as fragile and tenuous in that setting as an ice cube in the Sahara. The girl writes bitterly of her fierce hopes and literary dreams while the searing winds sandblast the small house.

Some hopes of a different life arrive with an invitation to live with a better-to-do grandmother (Aileen Brittain) and her entourage, including an aunt (Wendy Hughes) who is living proof of the death of hope, a hedonistic uncle (Peter Whitford) and an idiot suitor (Robert Grubb) who would send any sensible young woman scuttling to a convent in preference. cn 73 Judy Davis, star of "My Brilliant Career," working on journal entry. but with its jokes organic rather than imposed. To pay off her father's debt to a crude and illiterate entrepreneur, the girl agrees to tutor his innumerable rotten kids. While the long sequence is at first outrageously comic, it scon becomes a demonstration of the triumph of patience, kindness and real affection (with a little firmness thrown in).

Like good films always, "My Brilliant Career" must leave its viewers changed and enriched enlightened about a distant and different world, enlightened about the persistence of ideas, ideals and choices across the miles, oceans and years. There is as well the great pleasure that the presence of achievement always affords. Judy Davis as the young woman who has not indeed abandoned the dream of a brilliant career, elusive as it may seem, gives a performance that is so affecting and so right that she appears to be the character rather than to be acting the character. Neill is equally good as the man, used to a quite different set of attitudes (deferential and obliged) from the women for whom he would be the catch of a lifetime. His chauvinist heritage makes for some bristling responses, but his essential human sensitivity lets him understand what's going on in her soul.

The supporting roles are both vivid and restrained, acquiring a particular strength because the players themselves are so little familiar. Pat Kennedy is splendid as the tough-minded aunt with whom Neill lives. At the end the girl is bundling off her manuscript to a Glasgow publisher. The film, in a sense, is longer than the film, which thus has a lovely historical resonance, adding to its charm and its appeal. a 7 13 'MY BRILLIANT CAREER' Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes, Robert Grubb, Max Cullen, Pat Kennedy, Aileen Brittain, Peter Whitford, Carole Skinner, Alan Hopgood, Julia Blake.

MPAA-rated: G. An Analysis Films release. Producer Margaret Fink. Director Gillian Armstrong. Script Eleanor Witcombe from the novel by Miles Franklin.

Production design Luciana Arrighi. Costumes Anna Senior. Photography Don McAlpine. Featuring.