"Looking for Alibrandi", Looking for the Eye Candy

Pia Miranda faces off with Anthony LaPaglia in Looking for Alibrandi.

Looking for Alibrandi, Melina Marchetti's beloved 1992 coming-of-age novel about a 17-year-old Italian-Australian girl, is a staple in Australian schools. The book follows Josephine, the smart, outspoken protagonist through her final year of school as she comes to terms with her illegitimacy, her Italian roots, her friendships, and her first serious relationship. Marchetti renders her characters with absolute sincerity and carefully tackles issues such as racism, religion, depression, and social class, giving us a vivid portrait of Australia in the early 90s. 

A film adaptation was released in 2000, but sadly retained none of the novel's nuance and careful characterization. Ironically, the screenplay was penned by Marchetti herself, and she even won an Australian Film Institue award for her work. (The film received a slew of other awards as well.) Yet, the film makes the fatal (rookie?) mistake of turning the book’s first-person narrative into a voiceover, clumsily hammering home what could have been expressed through the performances. I blanched as the protagonist-narrator started announcing lines such as ("This might be where I come from but do I really belong here?" "I have go to get out of here.") not two minutes into the film.

Pia Miranda, perfecting the teenage eye roll.

The performances also suffer from the blunt storytelling, and the characters seem to go from one emotional state to the other without the scenes to sufficiently explain them. Josie is portrayed by Pia Miranda, who was 27 (!) at the time of filming. She looks at home playing a teenager and pulls off her character's spunky, frustrated side, but fails to display any of the restless intelligence that gives her the aforementioned spunk. Like too many other teen films and TV films, we can really only take the script's word that this is a smart girl.

Matthew Newton as John Barton, a well-to-do politician's son.

Kick Gurry as Jacob Coote, the working-class school president.

But I had a bigger issue with the casting of Kick Gurry and Matthew Newton as Jacob Coote and John Barton, respectively. As polar opposites who are both drawn to Josie, the two boys play crucial roles in the story. I expect I was not the only person who was left disappointed when the two made their appearance. This isn't an escapist teen comedy, like say, Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, in which the 15-year-old protagonist snags a teenaged Aaron Johnson (Nowhere Boy, Kick-Ass) in the end. But as the romantic interest (Gurry) and the untouchable good guy (Newton), it would make sense for the charactes to be physically appealing. What kind of eye candy is this?

Matthew Newton as John Barton.

 Kick Gurry as Jacob Coote.

My desire to dissect the film more or less fizzled after I got wind of these two. I could have forgiven the annoying voiceover and clumsy story development, but without aesthetic pleasure, the redeeming factor, there was just too little to go on.

Hijacking the Textbook

This distractingly cute airplane paper clip led me to waste five minutes at work, zooming it across different surfaces. Here, the book The Visual Story, Second Edition: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media provides a nice backdrop. It's proving to be an interesting read.

Peace?

(Dove balloons from a wedding in Chiba.)

Irène Némirovsky's five-part plan for her novel Suite française, which she started writing in 1941:

1. Storm (later changed to Storm in June)
2. Dolce
3. Captivity
4. Battles?
5. Peace?

Set in France, Suite weaves together multiple storylines to tell the intersecting fates of the French during World War II. Storm in June follows Parisians of various social backgrounds as they flee to the countryside, while Dolce focuses on a small rural town under German occupation. The bare bones of the latter three parts were in place, but before they could be written, the Jewish-born Némirovsky was sent to Auschwiz. She died there in 1942, after a month in the concentration camp.

Published in its unfinished form in 2004, Suite française gained worldwide attention for being a rare war novel that was written while the events were still unfolding. While this immediacy is one of the novel's its greatest assets, it meant that Némirovsky could only imagine what remained to be seen. The question mark at the end of the final part, Peace, is indicative of the despair and uncertainty she must have felt.