Australian Left Review
Article Title
Film Review: My Brilliant Career
Abstract
My Brilliant Career is the kind of film that makes you weep for lost opportunities. Beautifully photographed and tranacendentally acted, what an immense pity that it isn’t about anything very much .... or, to be more exact, anything very much Australian. Like many recent Oz films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom) it is picture-book pretty, but despite the glowing Australian countryside and deliciously rich tumof- the-century colonial interiors, the film is famine rather than feast. The psychological pseudo-feminism which the film’s makers seem to think suffices for a plot simply cannot carry the whole, and it becomes clear that My Brilliant Career is simply the start of someone’s brilliant career in international marketing: the film carefully packages those aspects of Australian a which will travel best to overseas up-market audiences, insatiably demanding “history” as local color.