Well I finally got to see My Brilliant Career! This film was released when I was in high school and I would have eaten it up at the time, as Judy Davis plays a headstrong independent 18 year old trapped in the Australian outback in the early 1900s. She has vague ideas of some sort of life ahead of her which involves music or literature or the arts in some form but has no idea of how to achieve it.
A film adaptation of the book by Miles Franklin the entire supporting cast seems determined to marry off Judy's character Sybylla Melvyn as the only way to tame the "wild beast" she has become.
After being sent to her more genteel grandmother's house and gentrified by her gorgeous Aunt Helen she falls for a very young Sam Neill (well who wouldn't, I ask you?) and then the struggle inside of her really begins. Will she chose the career or will she chose Harry?
Personally, I would have tried to have both, but that is just me. You'll have to watch the film yourself to see how it ends but let's just say this is not Anne of Green Gables, even though these two redheads in the colonies have their similarities!
This is just a lovely little film for a night where you need a lovely little film. It has a definite feminist feel to it which is not surprising as it was written by an Australian woman at the turn of the century and then adapted by women (producer, director and screenwriter) in the post bra burning seventies I remember so well.
You go girls!!!!!
