I think it was made in the 80s when period stories were heavily romanticised and women wore a lot of lace and men wore puffy shirts, but they all seem to be wearing pretty normal clothes. Period clothes, but they were plain and real-looking, and also drizabones and boots. Very easy to identify with the place.
It's not an amazing script, and the story is pretty simple, but it's a really good piece of Australian rural culture. Girls on the ag college I use to work at loved it. It's a shame there isn't more like it, because I think bush culture is under represented. It was cool watching Australian men do rugged, useful things like crack whips and boil tea on a fire, foggy forests and horses running over mountains, and that stuff is still there today. The whips, the horses, the mountains, the roughness. I don't get into dramas like Mcleods or East of whatever it was. It shouldn't be a soap and it shouldn't be false nostalgia.
It is basically a coming-of-age story, which is another story rarely told in our age of delayed adulthood. I've been hearing a lot of media conversation about when do boys become men in our society, how do we mark that... so there is a line in the movie that stuck out to me. The young bloke says "it's more than a man can take" and the old fellas say "Man?" and he answers "my dad raised me to be a man".
Anyway, it was good. Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson are quite good. The horse ride down the cliff is very good. The landscape is the best part, and the people on horses improve it. Make another one and I'll watch it.
1 comment:
I don't think I've ever watched it! How unAustralian of me. Let's watch it together :)
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