The girl’s mother was British; her stepmother is African, like her father, who is a diplomat. Uganda is newly independent and is approaching the agony of the Idi Amin years. Events far away in Africa will decide whether the boy and girl will be able to carry on a normal teenage flirtation, or whether she will be swept away by the tide of history. Meanwhile, their eyes wide open, with joy and solemnity, they try to honor their love.
The movie is not about “movie teenagers,” those unhappy creatures whose interests are limited and whose values are piggish. Most movies have no idea how thoughtful and responsible many teenagers are—how seriously they take their lives, how carefully they agonize over personal decisions. Only a few recent films, like Say Anything and Man in the Moon, have given their characters the freedom that Flirting grants—for kids to grow up by trying to make the right choices.
In Flirting, every scene serves a purpose. We go to classrooms and dormitories, to Parents’ Day and sporting events, and we see the wit and daring with which Thandie and Danny arrange to meet under the eyes of their teachers. We also get a sense of the schools; the boys’ school, where one of the teachers is too fond of caning, and another too fond of building model airplanes, and the girls’ academy, where one of the older girls (Nicole Kidman) is responsible for Thandie, but secretly admires her willingness to break the rules.
Scene after scene is written with delicacy and wit. For example, a scene in which the young lovers’ parents meet. Neither set of parents knows their child is dating at all; the way they all behave in this social setting, in a time and place where interracial dating raises eyebrows, is written with subtlety and tact. The adult actors bring a kind of awkward grace to the scene that is somehow very moving. The little nonconversation between Danny’s parents, after they are alone again, is priceless.
Race itself is not the issue in Flirting, however; the movie is a coming-of-age drama (and comedy) about the ways in which these two young people balance lust with mutual respect, and how the girl, who is wiser and more mature, is also enormously tactful in guiding and protecting the boy that she loves. There is a scene in which they explore one another sexually, but it is not a “sex scene” in any conventional sense of the term, and the way it is handled is a rebuke to the way so many movies cheapen physical love.
Flirting came to me out of the blue, without advance notice, and I was deeply affected by it. Then I discovered it is a sequel to an earlier Australian film, The Day My Voice Broke, unseen by me, and that Danny will be seen again in a third film still to be made by the writer-director, John Duigan. I have gone searching for the first film, which I remember having heard good things about, but I know from experience that it is possible to see Flirting all by itself.
So often we settle for noise and movement from the movie screen, for stupid people indulging unworthy fantasies. Only rare movies like Flirting remind us that the movies are capable of providing us with the touch of other lives, that when all the conditions are right we can grow a little and learn a little, just like the people on the screen. This movie is joyous, wise, and life-affirming, and certainly one of 1992’s best films.
Innocence
NO MPAA RATING, 94 m., 2001
Julia Blake (Claire), Charles “Bud” Tingwell (Andreas), Terry Norris (John), Kristien Van Pellicom (Young Claire), Kenny Aernouts (Young Andreas). Directed and produced by Paul Cox. Screenplay by Cox.
Here is the most passionate and tender love story in many years, so touching because it is not about a story, not about stars, not about a plot, not about sex, not about nudity, but about love itself. True, timeless, undefeated love. Innocence tells the story of two people who were lovers in Belgium as teenagers and discover each other, incredibly, both living in Adelaide, Australia, in their late sixties. They meet for tea and there is a little awkward small talk and then suddenly they realize that all the old feelings are still there. They are still in love. And not in some sentimental version of love for the twilight years, but in mad, passionate, demanding, forgiving, accepting love.
Paul Coxx’s Innocence is like a great lifting up of the heart. It is all the more affirming because it is not told in grand, phony gestures, but in the details of the daily lives of these two people. Life accumulates routines, obligations, habits, and inhibitions over the years, and if they are going to face their feelings then they’re going to have to break out of long, safe custom and risk everything.
Their names are Claire (Julia Blake) and Andreas (Charles “Bud” Tingwell). Both actors are respected in Australia, both unknown in North America, which is all the better, because the purity of this story would be diffused by the presence of familiar faces (perhaps, for example, The Bridges of Madison County would have seemed riskier without the familiarity of Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep). Andreas is a retired music teacher. His wife died thirty years ago. Claire has long been married to John (Terry Norris), in a marriage she thinks, in that bittersweet phrase, will see her out. Both Claire and Andreas have children, friends, people who count on their predictability. How, for example, does Andreas’s housekeeper of many years feel when she discovers (as a housekeeper must) that he is sleeping with someone?
Not that sleeping with someone is that easy. In the movies, characters fall into bed with the casual ease of youth or experience, and no film ever stops to consider that questions of modesty, fear, or shyness might be involved. Paul Cox is a director who never loses sight of the humor even in the most fraught situations, and there is a moment in the film that is just about perfect, when Claire and Andreas find themselves at last unmistakably alone in a bedroom, and she says: “If we’re going to do this—let’s do it like grown-ups. First, close the curtains. Then, close your eyes.”
Innocence has no villains. The treatment of John, Claire’s husband, is instructive. He is not made into a monster who deserves to be dumped. He is simply a creature of long habit, a man who is waiting it out, who wears the blinders of routine, who expects his life will continue more or less in the same way until accident or illness brings it to a close. When Claire decides to tell him about Andreas (“I’m too old to lie”), his reaction is a study in complexities, and Paul Cox knows human nature deeply enough to observe that in addition to feeling betrayed, disappointed, and hurt, John also feels—well, although he doesn’t acknowledge it, somehow grateful for the excitement. At last something unexpected has happened in the long slow march of his life.
The casting of Blake and Tingwell must have been a delicate matter. It is necessary for them to look their age (unlike aging Hollywood stars who seem stuck at forty-five until they die). But they must not seem dry and brittle, as if left on the shelf too long. Both of them seem touchable, warm, healthy, alive to tenderness and humor. And there is a sweet macho stubbornness in Tingwell’s Andreas, who refuses to accept the world’s verdict that he must be over “that sort of thing” at “his age.” He is not over it, because, as he writes her in the letter that brings them together, he always imagined them on a journey together, and if she is still alive then the possibility of that journey is alive. If sixty-nine is a little late to continue what was started at nineteen—what is the alternative?