Flirting **** (1991, Noah Taylor, Thandie Newton, Nicole Kidman) – Classic Movie Review 1795

Writer-director John Duigan’s engrossing, beautifully crafted, sharp-witted 1991 coming-of-age tale is set in Australia during the 1960s in the gothic oppressions of an Australian public boarding school for boys, who are at the mercy of sadistic teachers. However, it is conveniently situated across a rather Freudian-seeming lake from a similar establishment for girls.

Noah Taylor stars as a stuttering teenager called Danny Embling who has been sent to the school, where he is bullied and tormented because of his awkward manner. But he meets an African girl, the self-possessed Thandiwe Adjewa (Thandie Newton, in her movie debut), who is battling being discriminated against at her school.

A tender, awkward romance blossoms between the two outsiders, while everyone around them tries to stop their blossoming inter-racial relationship. But they unite in a firm clandestine alliance against authority and the majority as they come of age in a rites of passage story that heralds the end of adolescence for them. Nicole Kidman also appears as Nicola, a sexually repressed senior at Thandiwe’s school and the wonderful young cast also features Naomi Watts.

This follow-up to Duigan’s 1987 film The Year My Voice Broke (also with Taylor in his Danny character) boasts telling, fresh and appealing performances by the teenage heroes and sensitive but incisive direction by Duigan, drawing on his own Sixties experiences for the darker aspects of school life back then in Australia. It won three Australian Film Institute awards, including Best Film, Best Production Design and Best Editing.

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