Twenty-twenty three is starting to seem, quite early on, like the year where I'm regurgitating a lot of previous output. Last month's first entry in my monthly series, Audient Classics, involved revisiting Sherlock Jr. -- which I had seen and written about as part of my 2016 silent movie series, No Audio Audient. It was the second movie in that series.
Now, it's the third movie of 2014's Australian Audient that I'm revisiting. Strictly Ballroom came up as part of that series, and I wrote my thoughts on it then. And even though that's nearly nine years ago, I feel like my takeaways this time will be very similar. As we did with Sherlock Jr., I'll write it up first and see what I said back then after the fact.
I'm worried I'm going too heavy in that regard in 2023 and I'm going to regret it. Of the 30 films I expect to watch in 2023 as part of four recurring series -- that would be 12 for one monthly series, and six each for three bi-monthly series -- only six of those films will be new to me, those being the three each from Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion in Campion Champion and Bigelow Pro. Well, I do tend to rewatch a lot of movies each year -- 26 former #1s in 2022, as you know. I guess my rewatches will be just a little more curated than usual this year, though I may find myself growing weary of it sooner than I thought -- especially if I wrote about those movies on here the first time.
Well, let's dive into Strictly Ballroom and see how we go. I don't expect there to be a lot of Baz Jazz Hands overlap after this, since I don't recall writing about Baz Luhrmann's other films, though I've certainly mentioned my love for Moulin Rouge! at least in passing.
In addition to seeming like a blueprint for a number of future Luhrmann movies -- Rouge! and The Great Gatsby in particular come to mind -- one thing that really registered to me this time was how Australian this movie is. That's something I would have noted the first time but also would have appreciated more today, after being in the country for nearly ten years, as opposed to the six months I'd been here at the time I first saw it. Certain templates of an Australian male that I've come to know quite well are firmly on display here, certain ways of saying things that strike me as so uniquely Australian. There's a scene where the lead, Scott Hastings -- played by a man, Paul Mercurio, who is today a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly -- asks another dancer, who is also Scott's best friend, what he thought of Scott's new dance steps. The friend, played by the wonderfully named actor Pip Mushin, thrice states "I don't know," in this particular way where each one-syllable word has at least three syllables, yet it all comes out with a sort of dismissive rapidity that just made me crack up.
You might argue that this is a template for another Luhrmann movie, Australia, since these are his only two films set in his native country. But this is a look at a "real" sort of Australia, even as it is drenched in fantasy, whereas Australia represents a very cinematic sort of Australia, the type an outsider might make. I'll probably have more thoughts on that in August, when that movie comes up on the schedule.
How real? In the opening scene we see Scott and his soon-to-be former partner competing in the Waratah Championships, which just sounds so parochial. Waratah means a number of different things in Australia -- it's the name of a plant, and there's a place called Waratah Bay here in Victoria -- but the name is meant to indicate a little backwater competition, even though the dancers here are considered candidates to take home the coveted top prize at the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship. Which in its way could not seem further away from Waratah.
Even though it shows Luhrmann's more modest origins, before he became "Baz Jazz Hands," the movie does reflect a certain ambition in terms of its soundtrack. It uses Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz" at the beginning, then later scores a key sequence of romantic escalation between Scott and his dance partner/love interest Fran (Tara Morice) to a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time." (Sung by Morice, I am now learning.) The movie also features as its theme song "Love is in the Air" by Australian disco star John Paul Young, which I think I always thought was a Burt Bacharach song.
The movie also really showcases Luhrmann's tendency to view the world through a sort of warped, fish eye lens. Some extreme closeups of characters reminded me of things we might see from Terry Gilliam, specifically the scene involving Jim Broadbent in Time Bandits. (That may be no coincidence, as Broadbent would go on to appear in Moulin Rouge!) Things like this would have registered Luhrmann as a filmmaker with a particular aesthetic specificity, the kind that might win him a Shakespeare adaptation starring major Hollywood actors his next time out.
Though of course, the swoony romance itself would have been a bigger factor in making him the logical interpreter of Romeo & Juliet. As I tend to be in most Luhrmann films, I was really taken with the sweetness and earnestness he brings us in the development of the feelings between Scott and Fran. It's obvious they're going to get there because that's the sort of movie this is, but Luhrmann was even back then capable of framing iconic moments to enrich that journey.
One last random observation. The lead, Paul Mercurio, is almost a dead ringer for fellow Australian Guy Pearce. Although I don't see a lot of mentions of their similarity on the internet -- just one query about whether Pearce was in Strictly Ballroom -- don't tell me you don't see it:
I've always thought Australian men have a tendency to look a certain way that signals they are Australian, which I can't really define, but which I know when I see. This could be an extreme example of that ... or just a coincidence.
Okay, let's see what I said the last time I wrote about Strictly Ballroom.
Some similar sentiments, though maybe not as many as I thought. I remembered writing about the technique where Luhrmann pans from a lower to a higher floor of a building (or vice versa), a technique with echoes in later films, so I specifically didn't mention it this time, though I did still enjoy that quite a bit. This paragraph stuck out to me in particular for repeating some of the sentiments I've just written, but is also notable for its failure of fact-checking:
"It's interesting to see how much of the Luhrmann flourishes already exist here. One is what we will call the "frenetic close-up," where Luhrmann swoops his camera in at the unnaturally frenzied face of a character, making them appear almost grotesque. Think Jim Broadbent dancing in Moulin Rouge! Another is his earnest repurposing of pop music, as (cover versions of) both "Love is in the Air" and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" are used prominently and to emotionally cathartic effect."
As it turns out, the Cyndi Lauper cover was not "True Colors" but rather "Time After Time," which came out around the same time and was also a ballad, so it was easy to confuse them. And the "Love is in the Air" that appears here is not a cover, but actually the original.
Okay, in April I'll catch William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet for the first time in 27 years. I certainly won't have any old thoughts to compare that one to, though I am currently watching Claire Danes in the TV show Fleishman is in Trouble, so that might make an interesting point of comparison.
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