High Tide

When My Brilliant Career was released in 1979, it unleashed two of the distinctive talents in the Australian cinema: Judy Davis, the lead actress, and Gillian Armstrong, the director.

Since that film, each has done very nicely. Davis has become one of the world’s finest actors, recently nabbing a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the central role in David Lean’s superproduction, A Passage to India. And Armstrong has made the coveted jump to Hollywood filmmaking, with Mrs. Soffel, starring Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson.

A new Australian movie, High Tide, brings Armstrong and Davis back together, with results that are deeper, darker, more searching than My Brilliant Career.

The main character of High Tide, Lilli (Davis), is like the headstrong suffragette from My Brilliant Career in a disappointed future life: She’s still strong-willed and peculiar, but now tired, caustic, and alone.

Lilli has spent her brilliant career traveling on the road as a backup singer for a third-rate Elvis impersonator (Frankie J. Holden). He fires her in a seaside town called Eden, where Lilli is stuck for a few days when her car goes on the fritz.

Unknown to Lilli, her adolescent daughter (Claudia Karvan) lives in the town with her grandmother (Jan Adele). Lilli had abandoned the child as an infant many years before. Now, upon meeting the girl again (Lilli is drunk on the floor of a beach changing-room at the time), she has to decide whether to tell the girl who she is, and where to take it after that.

Davis plays the complex and not particularly likable character with a ferociousness that becomes profoundly moving. When she and her new boyfriend (Colin Friels) take a driving trip during her stay, she says, “The best thing in the world, this. Taking off. Going somewhere.” Running away is what she’s done all her life, and Eden is the place where she finally faces up to some longstanding responsibilities.

Armstrong and her topnotch cinematographer Russell Boyd get a good, lonely atmosphere in this little town, where Lilli’s daughter lives in a trailer park overlooking the beach. Most importantly, Armstrong and Davis are on the same uncompromising wavelength with Lilli: They refuse to make her artificially admirable. Armstrong’s camera is frequently in motion, as though Lilli’s restlessness is carrying the movie into new and strange places – taking off, going somewhere.

It’s somewhere pretty special. Although Laura Jones’ screenplay contains some dialogue of the TV-movie variety, High Tide casts up images and ideas that linger. It’s not as cuddly, and it won’t be as popular, as My Brilliant Career, but it is a superior film.

First published in The Herald, February 1988

David and Friels are, as you know, married in real life. Armstrong should have made more features; her last fiction film, 2007’s Death Defying Acts, bypassed me completely.