My Brilliant Career

The brilliant career this film celebrates is Judy Davis’s -- all blazing intensity, glowing freckles, and wild red hair, she has gone on to ornament any movie she has appeared in since, especially Husbands and Wives and other Woody Allen films, and reached prima donna status by channeling Judy Garland in a recent acclaimed tv biopic. I would single out two films from her native Australia for particular recommendation: she’s hilarious as Stalin’s one-time lover in Children of the Revolution, and multifaceted as a backup singer to an Elvis impersonator in High Tide, where she re-teams with director Gillian Armstrong, another brilliant career that emerged from this film. An adaptation of an autobiographical novel by a 16-year-old girl emerging from the Outback at the end of the 19th-century, the success of this film comes in capturing two historical moments besides the one depicted. First, that stage of the women’s movement when it became popular to cheer for the girl who chose work of her own over the handsome leading man. And second, the emergence of Down Under into its current preeminence on the stage of world cinema (think Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Peter Jackson, etc. etc.) It’s fun to see a young Sam Neill as well, but it’s Judy Davis who makes this more than a period piece in multiple ways. Though for me the director is usually the star of a movie, lately I have become more and more fascinated with the cinematic magnetism of certain actresses, the ones the camera is said to love, who communicate a naked appeal through any character, however dressed and situated. (1979, dvd, r.) *7*