The Sapphires
Wayne Blair (2012)
The Sapphires has been a big hit in Australia, both in the theatre and in this screen adaptation. Although inspired by a true story, it’s a synthetic piece of cinema. Tony Briggs, who wrote the stage show, based it on the experiences of his mother and aunt and their two cousins. As youngsters, these Aboriginal women toured Vietnam as a pop foursome, performing to American (and Australian?) troops – in the late 1960s, when they had no chance of a singing career in their racially benighted homeland. It’s evident from an early stage that the script, by Briggs and Keith Thompson, is crude – in pushing the narrative forward, in dramatising conflicts between the main characters (there are few tensions that register continuously: once explained, they can be disposed of), in checking off the racial issues points. Wayne Blair’s direction emphasises the crudeness. This might not matter if the Sapphires’ numbers on stage obliterated the mechanical bits in between but they don’t. (I admit I don’t have much appetite for the soul music that becomes their speciality. Some of the songs leave me cold; when one that I like comes up, I just want to hear the original – of ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, for example.) Watching The Sapphires in the theatre may allow you to feel more the exhilaration that the girls experience as performers. As a pop ensemble on screen, they’re good enough but unexciting.
The McCrae girls – the sisters Gail, Cynthia and Julie and their cousin Kay – acquire an Irish manager called Dave Lovelace. As Dave, Chris O’Dowd looks older than his thirty-three years and that makes sense: Dave’s booze-based life (he’s a barman with a drink problem) is disappearing down the drain until the Sapphires – or the Cummeragunja Songbirds as they call themselves at first – enter it. The first singing in the movie is of ‘Yellow Bird’ by the girls’ mother and the two elder daughters – the third daughter Julie, the real voice of the family, eventually joins in reluctantly. Unconvincingly, too: she’s furious because her mother has said she’s too young – although Julie’s also a teenage mother – to get the bus with Gail and Cynthia to a talent contest taking place in a country town not too far from the family home. Even so, the ‘Yellow Bird’ number works well in that you see what the singing means to the singers. Nearly all the best musical bits of the film occur offstage. The sisters’ country and western number (a Merle Haggard song) at the talent contest is effective because you’re on the girls’ side, in the face of the outrageous racist hostility from the audience and the landlady of the pub where the contest is taking place. (It’s the pub where Dave works and he comperes the contest.) Otherwise, the music takes off only when Dave himself starts singing: rehearsing the girls and getting carried away with the music or – with Cynthia’s fiancé and the father of Julie’s child – supplying an intro verse to the Sapphires’ celebratory number, when they return home at the end of film. The girls’ harmonies sung down the phone from Vietnam to their worried mother back home is too calculated to have real impact.
There’s another, very different problem in moving the material from stage to screen. The physical constraints of theatre justify keeping the less enjoyable aspects of Vietnam out of the picture; there are some moments of peril and carnage in the film but these feel required and the war’s background role borders on the tasteless. Something similar happens when the girls watch a television news report of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A few seconds of the mountaintop speech on TV overpowers everything else in The Sapphires and it’s offensive that it’s included merely to flesh out the racial drama (even though, as I understood it, the McCraes had never heard of King – just as they didn’t know there was a war going on in Vietnam until they arrived there). The moment when Dave tells the always-in-charge eldest sister Gail that she has the weakest voice of the four is clumsy in terms of the other girls’ reactions, which rub salt in the wound, but Deborah Mailman plays Gail’s shock at her relegation well. Gail may be the vocal weak link in the Sapphires but Mailman, who played Cynthia in the original stage production in 2004, is by far the strongest and most fluid actress. Gail seems a generation older than the other girls, whom she bosses and protects. This sizeable woman is anomalous and touching when she’s pushed into the tight-fitting, sequined outfits the Sapphires wear on stage.
There’s a real chemistry between Mailman and Chris O’Dowd. He’s not the most adroit of actors: you can often hear him preparing for the delivery of Dave’s punchlines (and few of these are witty anyway). But O’Dowd gets inside the character. The sequence during which Dave gives Gail a letter expressing what he really feels, telling her to read it when he’s not around, is pure cliché. One screen minute after he’s handed over the note, a North Vietnamese bomb attack on the area in which the Sapphires are performing has separated the couple, and Gail doesn’t know if Dave’s alive or dead. Even so, Chris O’Dowd manages to make the scene truthful: when Dave says he’s never been any good at music or at life, he sounds as if he believes it, and that it matters to him. O’Dowd is effective too (more so than Deborah Mailman) when Dave, in a hospital bed, is reunited with Gail. I jotted down after seeing the film that I found Jessica Mauboy, as Julie, a bit X-Factory – before I knew that Mauboy is a former winner of Australian Idol. With Miranda Tapsell in the audience-pleasing role of Cynthia (this is a turn rather than a characterisation), Shari Sebbens as the nearly-white cousin Kay, and two older women with remarkable faces, Kylie Belling as the three sisters’ mother and Lynette Narkle as their grandmother.
25 September 2013