The Delinquents

(Chris Thomson, Australia, 1989)

Girl on Film

Every female actor in the world confronts, is crushed by, or manages to work with – sometimes brilliantly – the ledger of cultural stereotypes available for them to play, depending on their size, age, looks, disposition at any given moment of their career. For pop idols, this encounter with the Hall of Stereotypes instantly becomes a much tougher and narrower gauntlet. On this level – where stereotypes get mystified up to archetypes – the prospects are daunting: one is either a Marilyn figure, a femme fatale, a sweet innocent, a go-getting career gal …

Kylie Minogue’s film career is neither extensive nor illustrious. (I shall get that value judgment out of the way immediately.) One can quickly see how she was boxed into predictable female types across her various cameos and featured parts: ass-kicking tough babe in Bio-Dome (1996) or bitchy director in Cut (2000 – where, as a ‘Hilary’ helming a trashy horror film called Hot Blooded, she gets to speak the memorable line: “Everyone’s got their level, and mine is making intelligent family drama”); lovely fairy in Moulin Rouge (2001) – a role that, unsurprisingly, was widely gossiped to be a desperate last-minute add-on, the typical kind of slur that attaches itself to singers-turned-big-screen-actors. In Sample People (2000), it’s her turn to become the femme fatale of film noir – alas, more Jessica Rabbit than Rita Hayworth. (2025 postscript: I wrote this paragraph 10 years before the appearance of Leos Carax’s sublime Holy Motors.)

Kylie’s best role is in the already-mostly-forgotten Australian teen movie, The Delinquents (1989) – a compromised work stranded between American pop vitalism, British kitchen-sink naturalism and Aussie laconicism, but certainly a gift to the star. That’s for a reason not necessarily glaringly evident at first blush: this time out, in fact at the very start of her film career, Kylie gets to tackle another of the great female archetypes, Madame Bovary.

I came to this flash serendipitously. Back in 1990 when I was assigned to write about the movie on its first release, something in the pre-publicity kept suggesting to me that I should hire Grease (1978) as homework and preparation before the main event. Perhaps it was the hint of Kylie on a path similar to that of another beloved Aussie lass: Olivia Newton-John. For there, in the tantalising spread of publicity pictures, was Kylie debuting in a film seemingly calculated to show off her range (something all pop stars are anxious to do in their crossover to film) by taking her from innocent country schoolgirl to Madonna-ish vamp in black leather, being attacked lustfully at the neck by her guy (Charlie Schlatter).

Whatever the flimsy storyline contrived to manoeuvre her from point A (innocence) to B (experience), the film promised to be a knowing vehicle for Kylie – driving from one florid, archetypal movie image to the next.

After all, there was also, looming in the picture, her great character name of Lola – activating memories of Marlene Dietrich’s fatally attractive Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (1930), or The Kinks’ gender-perverse “Lola”, or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 ‘singer-whore’ Lola (Barbara Sukowa), or Martine Carol in Max Ophüls’ Lola Montès (1955), that early ‘celebrity superstar’ adored and persecuted alike by her endless queue of male admirers. And not to mention that wonderful title: The Delinquents, the perfect, classic teen movie title (taken from the source, Criena Rohan’s respected 1962 novel) with its connotation of rebellion, lawlessness, vice and craziness – promising a summation of the early wave of the genre (Robert Altman made a film of the same name in 1957) and its modern, romantically charged variants, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983) and James Foley’s Reckless (1984).

In the event, there was nothing remotely like the sight of vamp Kylie with a hunk at her neck appearing anywhere in The Delinquents – only a girl meekly apologising to her man for “indiscretions” we never see. (Unless, that is, it’s a sin to catch the flu, of which Lola is often guilty.) Nor was there much teen rebellion past a vaguely daring point – an interrupted grope in a public dressing room, the fleeting evocation of Jerry Lee Lewis, an inconsequential riot in a girls’ prison dorm to the strains of “Be Bop A Lula” (Lula/Lola, get it?) – beyond which the film is determined to match Lola up not only with a reformed, tamed Wild One, but an instant child as well, with Little Richard’s “Lucille” now transformed from an anthem of teenage wildlife to a cute, fun song suitable even for young marrieds.

But maybe I showed up for that screening in 1990 with the wrong bag of expectations. Another paradigm for viewing the film, one cued by the appearance in it of a poster for Roberto Rossellini’s magnificent Stromboli (1949) with Ingrid Bergman (a remarkable work about the fury and ecstasy of a trapped woman) was fortuitously nourished by the video I actually did manage to watch in place of Grease: Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywood version of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1949), one of many film adaptations (others are by Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol and Manoel de Oliveira, a well as a 2000 British TV version showcasing another Australian, Frances O’Connor). Is The Delinquents better approached, then, as a woman’s melodrama?

Like many star vehicles of old (Garbo’s, for instance, or Bette Davis’), it certainly conforms to the convention whereby the maximum of both screen time and dramatic character is invested in the female star – even to the extent of making the supposed male hero a bit of a blank. Kylie proves herself equal to the challenge of this single-minded centring of the film on her good self.

The Madame Bovary connection is not exactly arbitrary, as it turns out. Like Bovary (Jennifer Jones) in Minnelli’s telling of that tale, Lola is first seen performing the rigid task of practising piano scales – a sign of her gender imprisonment within a model of refined, bourgeois behaviour (Lola, of course, would rather practise her boogie-woogie). More profoundly, like Emma Bovary, Lola is shown as the typical female victim of the dreams and images of romantic love circulated by a patriarchal society – she compares everything that happens to her to Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet (the camp rendezvous with Baz Luhrmann already written in the stars!), much to the puzzlement of her less-romantically-inclined guy.

If seen in this light, couldn’t the ironic or even tragic sting in Lola’s tale be in the fact that, as a Romantic, she is unable to break through to a feminist independence but, on the contrary, is doomed to depend on a man who is forever off on his own mythic gender trip, sailing the high seas with his symbolic Good Father (incarnated with appropriate crustiness by Bruno Lawrence)? Is The Delinquents, as woman’s melodrama, starting to resemble a sad, incisive, excruciatingly double-binding film of old like Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)?

It doesn’t quite pan out that way. The attitude of the film (directed by New Zealander Chris Thomson [1945-2015] and written by Clayton Frohman with Mac Gudgeon [1949-2023]) towards romantic love, and how it wants to depict it, is very confused. For perhaps half of its running time, The Delinquents takes a decidedly unromantic, distanced, ironic view on Lola’s romantic obsessions, counterpointing the first physical fumblings of the lovers, or the unglamorous environs of an interstate train, with sentimentally overblown rock’n’roll ballads like “Only You” (used to devastating effect in the contemporaneous anti-romance War of the Roses) and “Three Steps to Heaven”.

At a certain point, however – when Lola is put in the charge of her repressive aunt – the film changes its stance, and suddenly wants to start investing positivity in Lola’s assertions of romantic idealism and sexual intensity. Yet it is unable, or unwilling, to really embrace all-stops-out Romanticism; soon after Lola’s passionate declarations, the scenario starts making her the practical one in the loving couple, more interested in settling down than in being fast and free. And as for the sex scenes – despite all the heat which pre-publicity assured us was being generated in those brief and perfunctory trysts – the most arousing thing in The Delinquents is doubtless the sight and sound of Lola talking about how much she enjoys sex. And that just doesn’t seem enough of a commitment to this matter on the film’s part.

Whenever I focus on a cluster of movies through the filter of one actor’s career – rather than, say, through director, genre or close, interpretative analysis of individual works – I see new patterns and intuit new problems. Above all, I come to appreciate the always limited range of prospective parts that are on offer to an individual actor and, conversely, the kinds of pressures and influences which their already-established persona brings to bear on the specific material at hand.

Even though Minogue has only made a mere handful of films – and really only The Delinquents, still, gives her the opportunity for a starring role – we can already see the predictable patterns tightening around her: the two-step of worldly, MTV sexiness and suburban, soapie innocence; the difficulty of squaring her up, within fiction, with a romantic partner worthy of her, or with a family unit that might either fulfil or destroy her imaginary destiny.

Vamp or cutie, Mum or babe, romantic dreamer or modern career pragmatist: as with every star, the categories and dilemmas of the on-screen imaginary inevitably spill over into the public, off-screen Kylie we all greedily share and construct. And, again as with every star, the sign of Kylie’s durability (as with Marilyn’s or Madonna’s) is her ability to accommodate and play with these opposites, holding them in tension or swapping them in a dizzy, breathless alternation.

© Adrian Martin February 1990 / June 2002