Fans of movie musicals are given short shrift in Australia, with a national film industry that rarely provides opportunity for audiences to watch locally made toe-tappers in which singing and dancing are as second nature as breathing.
Movie musicals can be separated into one of two camps: those based in stagey alternate universes where singing is a natural form of conversation and random people on the street join strangers to boogie and prance, and those that follow singers and musicians as they rehearse and perform.
The few Australian-made iterations of both have often proven popular . Two of the former (Moulin Rouge and Happy Feet) rank in the top 10 Australian features of all time at the local box office and two of the latter (The Sapphires and The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert) rank in the top 20. Others have achieved varying degrees of success and longevity, from 1977’s Dot and the Kangaroo (a modest success theatrically but which had an enormous shelf life) to 1982’s popular but critically maligned The Pirate Movie.
Director Rachel Perkins’s 2009 soulful and spritzy crowd-pleaser Bran Nue Dae (adapting a stage production by Aboriginal playwright and composer Jimmy Chi) has a dancing foot in both camps. The characters play instruments and sing in groups but also burst into spontaneous song in the manner of a theatre show or a Hollywood musical.
Fifteen minutes in, clean-cut protagonist Willie (Rocky McKenzie) croons the first old school-style number – a lovesick, homesick declaration of his intent to return to the gal he has a crush on, Rosie (a radiant Jessica Mauboy). Willie has been sent by his mother (Ningali Lawford) to train to be a priest at a Perth boarding school, run by the screwy and flamboyant Father Benedictus (Geoffrey Rush).
After an incident involving a late night munchies mission (read: theft of food from the college kitchen), Willie runs away and bumps into Uncle Tadpole (Ernie Dingo) who offers to take him back to Broome. Tadpole’s hitchhiking technique is to literally throw himself in front of a Kombi van and guilt a couple of hippies into driving them.
When a young lady in the van turfs the maps out the window (“we don’t need maps, we have an Aboriginal elder”), Dingo gives the perfect caught-in-the-moment reaction, one small part of a beautifully judged comedic performance: craned eyebrows; manic eyes; face contorted into comic alarm.
The road movie proper begins, with a series of cameos including Magda Szubanski as a fly-swatting cafe attendant with a penchant for provocative enunciation of the word “hot” and Deborah Mailman, who bursts woozily onto the scene as a drunken random offering to show Willie a condom trick.
In the next scene, said condoms hang like shiny baubles from a magical-looking tree with impossibly bright coloured leaves, in front of blue-tinted smoke from a fire and below a dark sky spotted with stars. Bran Nue Dae’s cinematography, from the late and great Andrew Lesnie, comprises a hyper-coloured palette bordering on Day-Glo. The lightning in particular is strikingly bold and beautiful.
Perkins draws together other playful technical properties: unconventional twists and twirls of the camera, bursts of light and quirky sound effects (when five boys sneak past the father’s room, faces stacked on top of each other next to the door frame, the audio comprises a Three Stooges-esque series of squeaks).
There is a rich, zesty vitality coursing through Bran Nue Dae. In musicals, many of film-making’s conventional framing techniques (pacing, the staging of dialogue) fly out the window and take a back seat to more visceral qualities: verve, momentum, liveliness.
When it feels as if the film may have hit a slow spot, Dingo performs a surreal and magnificently staged rendition of Dreamtime rumination Listen to the News (“talking about the blues of our people”). Missy Higgins, Dan Sultan and others fill out the list of performers in the film; the show-stopping tune which brings them all together, and for which the production is best known, is Nothing I Would Rather Be (“than to be an Aborigine”).
Plenty of song and dance productions aspire for that champagne-popping feeling, and here, Perkins gets it just right. When the storytelling contingent wobbles (such as the ludicrous ending, contrived to the point at which happenstance becomes a punchline), the energy of the film prevails. At the time, critical response was tepid but audiences voted (perhaps danced) with their feet: Bran Nue Dae was a well-deserved hit, clocking up over $7.5m at the local box office.
