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The Sapphires
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Small town, long grass, children running. In an Australian film, what would we usually hear over these opening images? Probably sweeping, orchestral music, or – since a title has informed us that this is 1958 – a rock’n’roll standard from the era by Johnny O’Keefe. The choice made by The Sapphires is, however, arrestingly odd: “Run Through the Jungle” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, vintage 1970. It’s not Australian and it’s out of time – but it works, instantly kicking things into gear. The song also sets up a storyline. Three Aboriginal sisters, Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Mauboy) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), plus their cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens), like to sing American country’n’western songs. When Dave (Chris O’Dowd), an Irish visitor with vague connections to the music industry, appoints himself their manager, he makes one stipulation: the sound has to be black soul. And since we are now in 1968, The Sapphires head off to Vietnam to perform. Films about the trials and tribulations of show business tend to be self-allegories – about their place in entertainment history, and their prospects for box office success. So The Sapphires, a film about indigenous Australian traditions mixing with and going out to the wider world, is itself a bold gesture, hoping to conquer the international marketplace. It tries to accommodate as many cultural tastes as possible – and succeeded in attracting America’s Weinstein brothers (shudder) as co-conspirators at post-production. Director Wayne Blair juggles this busy material well. It’s the kind of movie that renders standard critical demurrals – that some of the comedic mugging is overdone, that the plot links don’t always make sense, that situations at times tip over into unreality – entirely beside the point. It is, indeed, the mark of a good, mainstream film, with its heightened air of wish-fulfilment fantasy, when it can manage to fly over mundane plausibility issues and niggling narrative questions. By the same token, much of the charm of The Sapphires for Australian audiences comes from the ways it deliberately falls short of the slick, Hollywood, musical biopic model. It is like a canny mix of Dreamgirls (2006) and Alan Parker’s gritty The Commitments (1991) – with the superb Mailman always on hand to deflate any looming sentimentality with her insults and hard truths. Amidst all the feel-good vibes, the film even manages, with a salutary shock, to touch upon issues such as the Stolen Generations. It handles this mix of entertainment and populist politics better than Baz Luhrmann’s dire Australia (2008). Maybe The Sapphires lacks one thing: a big, extended, musical performance scene. That’s symptomatic: at the end, the film draws back to its real-life origin in the indigenous community and, in this sense, turns its back on globalised showbiz. This indicates a tension we have since seen in much Australian indigenous high-flying cultural production – compare, for example, the hopeful cosmopolitan path of Ivan Sen (Loveland [2022]) with the more resistant creative trajectory of Sapphires cinematographer Warwick Thornton (his one-man TV series The Beach [2020]) … not to mention the artworld comets of Tracey Moffatt and the Karrabing Film Collective, or the sometimes difficult career of David Gulpilil (1953-2021). Blair himself has gone onto make an American movie, the poorly received Septembers of Shiraz (2015), and another Australian, cross-cultural comedy, Top End Wedding (2019) co-scripted by Tapsell. But at least The Sapphires makes its shamelessly “parochial” plot choice on behalf of local belonging on its own, proud terms. © Adrian Martin July 2012 / updated March 2023 |
