Gillian Armstrong (1979)

Set in late-nineteenth-century Australia, My Brilliant Career is the coming-of-age story of Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis).  Throughout her adolescence and into young womanhood, she rebels against a succession of different circumstances in order to assert the independence that she believes is rightfully hers.  The daughter of a frequently impoverished smallholder, Sybylla is suffocated by a drudging present that offers no future.  Her parents (Alan Hopgood and Julia Blake), concerned by their daughter’s wilfulness, send her to board with her better-off and well-named Grandma Bossier (Aileen Britton, who’s made up to look like Queen Victoria).  In her grandmother’s home, Sybylla finds her restlessness sharpened by her female relatives’ understanding and acceptance of their pre-ordained, subservient stations in life.  A rich and handsome landowner Harry Beecham (Sam Neill) courts Sybylla, who is eager to get her man but equally reluctant to sink into the restrictive institution of marriage.

Suddenly dispatched from her grandmother’s into a social and cultural wilderness, as governess to the illiterate brood of Mr McSwatt (Max Cullen), one of her father’s creditors, Sybylla is a study of furiously repressed resentment and frustration.  To make matters worse, her younger sister, in the meantime, is initiated into the higher family society that includes the company of Harry.   An implausible misunderstanding – her dim employer believes Sybylla is infatuated with one of his labourers – gets her the sack and out of jail.  She returns to her parents’ farm.  Having earlier postponed a definite answer to Harry’s marriage proposal, she now decides to turn him down for good.  In the opening sequence of Gillian Armstrong’s film, Sybylla starts determinedly to write.  In the final sequence, she dispatches the finished manuscript of My Brilliant Career, a book that a closing legend on the screen explains was first published in Edinburgh in 1901[1].  Sybylla’s story seems to belong to the tradition of nineteenth-century novels that chart the growth of a materially disadvantaged protagonist, overcoming vicissitudes and eventually accessing a world in which she or he (the reader believes) will both flourish and retain their individuality.  But Gillian Armstrong and her scenarist Eleanor Witcombe have shaped the material in ways that make it opaque.

Regardless of her changing surroundings and obligations, Sybylla’s ambition remains constant but, until nearly the end of the film, only vaguely defined.  She is egotistical (her self-description) and convinced that her destiny lies in the world of art – in literature or music or, as she pertly and nonchalantly suggests to her grandmother, opera:  Sybylla hasn’t yet decided which.  My Brilliant Career would be richer and more satisfying if the protagonist’s aspirations seemed to evolve through a combination of nature and nurture.  Instead, her appetite for success and independence, rather than deriving from events in the story, seems entirely preformed.  Armstrong and Witcombe evidently want to present Sybylla as a proto-feminist, without it mattering how she assesses or tests her potential to escape her environment.  The first-person narrative used at the start is quickly dropped and it’s not clear when the protagonist decides she’s going to be a writer.  We know only that she’s decided this by the time she finally turns Harry down.

In the last shot of the film, Sybylla, after posting her manuscript, gazes into a sunrise.  She may be convinced of her golden future but the viewer struggles to accept this heroine, who has thrived on dissatisfaction, suddenly tranquillised into a state of happy-ever-after because the life she wants could be about to begin.  The sunrise shot is altogether too pacific:  Sybylla, walking nervously away from the post-box with the sunrise behind her, as her parcel starts its journey to the other side of the world, would make more sense.  It’s a tribute to Judy Davis’s performance, however, that this ending is so unsatisfactory.  Her characterisation of Sybylla is convincing enough to make it jarring when the film suddenly undermines what the actress has achieved.

Sybylla dominates the film – she must be in more than ninety per cent of the frames – and there’s never any question of not identifying with her.  Equally, it’s difficult not to react against her hard-nosed self-centredness, confirmed in the dedication that ends her manuscript – a profession of love for all those with whom she has lived her ‘brilliant career’ and a sentimental ‘goodbye, God bless’ to the past.  If she is grateful to her relatives it’s chiefly because they’ve been grist to her literary mill and thereby a route to success and independence for Sybylla – just as they supplied her with the means to live and to rebel during her formative years.  Gillian Armstrong understates this.

The director’s view of Sybylla is political and limited but Judy Davis, full of athletic energy and with her big, combative eyes, makes her a powerful screen heroine.  Davis throws caution to the winds, either unconcerned about or sublimely confident of a brilliant career ahead of her in cinema.  Her strength and consistency of presence gives the impression of a character much more rounded than the one the script provides.  Davis gets inside Sybylla.  When the heroine’s frustrations compel her to slap a suitor or cane a child, Davis daringly suggests that Sybylla feels better for it (even excited by it).  Her high-necked governess costume may conceal the fact but the early scenes with the noisy McSwatt children make you realise how young and immature Sybylla herself still is.   (Davis is actually in her early twenties.)  Although her behaviour with Harry continues to be almost intolerably fierce, Davis also strikes notes of petulance and resilience in their courtship scenes.  There are moments – for example, during Sybylla’s introduction to Harry at her grandmother’s, after a mutually incognito meeting earlier in the day – when Davis’s moods change so rapidly it’s hard to keep up with her.

Sam Neill is essentially a phlegmatic foil to Judy Davis’s dynamo but his quiet performance builds intelligently, enabling us to realise eventually that Harry, never mind his wealth, looks and access to exalted social circles, is emotionally more vulnerable than Sybylla.  In spite of his privileged position, he is floundering beside the single-minded heroine.  It’s a pleasing subtlety of My Brilliant Career that Harry has his life mapped out for him by convention no less than the women in his family.  A man who is entitled to womanise, he sees marriage to Sybylla as a refreshing escape from the life of a young rake that he led before meeting her.  Sam Neill suggests a guarded compliance with social convention that masks Harry’s neediness:  there are occasional flashes of that neediness in the momentary anger in his eyes.  An extended pillow fight between Sybylla and Harry works well as a metaphor for his desire for sex, hers for the upper hand and the social and moral contexts that thwart them both.  Their desires, through the expectations of family and society, are temporarily reduced to this childish, apparently innocent interaction.  Sybylla’s determined view of matrimony as an arrangement designed to suit men, imprison women and thwart the possibility of a dignified, loving relationship between them guarantees the longer-term outcome.

Gillian Armstrong doesn’t always resist a temptation to which male Australian directors have recently succumbed:  to beautify their films as if hellbent on refuting received ideas about Aussie philistinism.  My Brilliant Career, photographed by Donald McAlpine, is sometimes artificially pictorial.   In the early stages, Sybylla has two suitors:  as well as Harry, there’s Frank Hawdon (Robert Grubb), a jackaroo.  Hawdon strides into then out of a wood with a bunch of marigolds behind his back, ready to present these to Sybylla; she is surrounded by a large red umbrella; your main thought is how vibrantly coloured the brolly and flowers are.  This is one in a (too long) series of illustrations of Hawdon’s pompous foolishness – yet Armstrong still wants Donald McAlpine to create a still-of-the-month effect.  But at least Australia is exceptionally well equipped to make a fantastic landscape everyday.  Sybylla’s conviction that the other man’s grass is always greener is made literally credible by the wonderfully lucent variety of greens McAlpine gives her to contemplate.

[1980]

[1]  Afternote:  Its author was ‘Miles Franklin’ – the pen name of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879–1954).