criterionforum.org

My Brilliant Career



For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin's novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the conventions of period romance. Headstrong young Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis, in a star-making performance), bemoans her stifling life in the backcountry, where her writerly ambitions receive little encouragement, and craves independence above all else. When a handsome landowner (Sam Neill), disarmed by her unruly charms, begins to court her, Sybylla must decide whether she can reconcile the prospect of marriage with the illustrious life's work she has imagined for herself. Suffused with generous humor and a youthful appetite for experience, My Brilliant Career is a luminous portrait of an ardently free spirit.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, approved by director Gillian Armstrong, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2009 featuring Armstrong
• New interview with Armstrong
• Interview from 1980 with actor Judy Davis
• New interview with production designer Luciana Arrighi
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carrie Rickey

*My Brilliant Beaver. or perhaps, My Beaver Career.

Caught this for the first time on Criterion Channel today. What a film! What a performance! Judy Davis has such a captivating and watchable presence that it would threaten to swallow the film if it weren't for Armstrong's unbelievable degree of attention to performative detail spanning the whole cast. It's like A nos amours, An Angel at My Table, and A Room With a View but more keenly observed, tough-minded, and lively than all of those more well known films put together. I dig Wanda and everything but if I had to choose one 1970s Ray Carney-approved feminist classic to watch for the rest of my life it would be this one by a long shot.

Randall Maysin wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 1:33 pm *My Brilliant Beaver. or perhaps, My Beaver Career.

Definitely My Beaver Career given Gary’s penchance for finding caps of whatever nudity is present in any film.

Chris, could you please check in the booklet the restoration credits for this one ?

I'm running between a bunch of different things today and just swamped but I took a quick picture and used a text converter app, so hope this helps (sorry for formatting)

About the Transfer
My Brilliant Career is presented in its
original aspect ratio of 1.851. Black bars
at the top and bottom of the screen are
normal for this format. This new digital
restoration was undertaken in collabora-
tion with the National Film and Sound
Archive of Australia. A new digital trans-
fer was created in 4K resolution on a
Northlight film scanner from the 35 mm
original camera negative. Thousands of
instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices,
and warps were manually removed using
MTI Film's DRS, while Digital Vision's
Phoenix was used for jitter, flicker, small
dirt, grain, and noise management
The original monaural soundtrack was
remastered from the 35 mm dual magnetic
mono track by Spectrum Films in Moore
Park, Australia.
TRANSFER SUPERVISORS
Gilin mtrn,nald Mclpine,Nicholas Beauman, Margaret Fink
PROJECT COORDINATOR
Gayle Lake/National Fim and Sound Archive,Acton,Australia
COLORIST
Roman Hankewya/ Harbor Picture Company,New York
ADDITIONAL COLOR GRADING
Giles Shenwood/Criterion Past, New York: Vandal,Sydney
DISC MASTERING
Pueloge. Los Angeles

That's perfectly good enough (though I guess Pueloge actually is a close enough OCR version of Pixelogic), thanks Chris !

I can't believe this was Armstrong's feature debut - she absolutely nails everything about it. The production design is incredible, the cinematography is among the most engaging I've ever seen in a period piece, and the performances (even from a typically off-kilter Sam Neill) are so assured. In the interview on the disc, Armstrong talks about how she wanted each character to be "layered," and, while I haven't read the source novel, whatever approach she took worked wonders. Harry's aunt, who starts off as and so easily could have been a typical "stuffy rich person" stereotype, becomes one of the most heartwarming characters in the whole film. We learn exactly why she approaches life the way she does, get to see the hidden artistic talents she has, and come to respect her as a person trapped in a society that makes rules seemingly on a whim - and this layering extends to almost all of the secondary characters. Not to mention Judy Davis's Sybylla, to whom I can (still) relate more than I'd like. A recurring theme, but she switches between world-weariness, passion, and rage with such ease that I can't believe this was only her second feature.

The extras on the disc are worth watching, too - the aforementioned interview with Armstrong is candid and open, the interview with Arrighi punctuated by photos of her family in clothes that served as reference points for the film's look, and (although not mentioned above) Armstrong's student short "One Hundred a Day" a clear indicator that her eye for texture was there from the beginning. If this disc isn't in my Top 5 for the year, it'll have been a very good year.

My “Brilliant” Svet
The review begins with this eyebrow-raising statement which, I don’t know how well it actually applies to the film, but as a real world ethos is...questionable:
“Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film My Brilliant Career is about a young Australian girl who discovers one of the simplest truths in life, which is that freedom has to be earned.”

HinkyDinkyTruesmith wrote: Sat May 11, 2019 3:37 pmI don’t know how well it actually applies to the film

It doesn't. I guess you could apply it to the plotline in the last third, in which Sybylla

Spoiler

finds herself teaching a group of unruly children as a result of her father's poor money management,

but even then I don't think that's the lesson we're meant to take away. I also love Svet's complete bewilderment at the ending, because he can't imagine a human acting irrationally or for purposes at odds with his own worldview.

The ending to this is incredible and so powerfully packed full of emotion and thought. I was ready to sell the sun and the moon for Davis and Neill. Admittedly, I’m one to enjoy melodrama as a mode of delivery against satire, but in such close proximity to Promising Young Woman my reservations there helped me understand what this does so well in its turn. This just so powerfully communicated why the universe of these characters could make someone like Davis.

First Amazon came for Picnic at Hanging Rock and I stayed silent. Now Netflix is re-adapting this

They’re also doing a 9 part adaptation of Don’s Party.

Just kidding