8 hours ago
10
“I’m hot headed, with a snub nose, and that’s why I prefer a direct gaze.”
So speaks Sybylla, the charmingly irrepressible and irrepressibly charming heroine of My Brilliant Career, played utterly convincingly and with vim, vigour and joy by Philippa Northeast in the new adaptation of Miles Franklin’s 1901 Australian classic of the same name. Creator Liz Doran must have wept with happiness when they found an actor capable of bringing so much to an already glorious script – and who embodies the joie de vivre upon which so much of the plot, as everyone she meets becomes part of her orbit, depends.
Sybylla is one of too many children for her hardworking mother and debt-ridden, irresponsible father to support. So she is sent from their impoverished farm in Possum Gully to stay with her maternal grandmother (Anna Chancellor), the aptly named Mrs Bossier. She is a successful horse breeder who lives in widowed splendour, with her other daughter Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly) miles away in a grand mansion. She has plenty of time on her hands to shape Sybylla into a proper model of womanhood and get her married off to a rich man who can take care of her and the rest of her family.
Sybylla does not take kindly to the revelation of Granny’s plans. “I’m being gussied up! … Slowly turned on a spit of propriety!” she writes in horror to her sister Gertie back home. Sybylla had thought she was going to be at Caddagat House, see the wider world and fuel her ambition to become a writer. Knowing that husbands do not help this mission, she practises a cheerful kind of resistance against Mrs B while throwing herself into the rest of her new life. She makes friends with Nell (Sherry-Lee Watson), the talented horse trainer from an Indigenous family who dreams of becoming Caddagat’s foreman despite the handicap, in 1890s rural Australia, of both her background and her sex.
Sybylla makes frenemies (but! He’s extremely attractive) with an English guest at the house, Frank (Jake Dunn), and becomes a mentee of sorts to their high society neighbour, the glamorously eccentric Augusta (Kate Mulvany, having a wild time). Augusta’s nephew Harry (Christopher Chung) is, like Frank, like all of us, drawn to this new, iconoclastic free spirit who has appeared in their midst – but the limits to Augusta’s bohemianism and other factors mean he is not as free in his turn as he might be to choose a wife.
The Sybylla-Frank-Harry love triangle evolves slowly and convincingly as the three young people make their mistakes, are overheard saying things to each other that they shouldn’t and generally explore the different kinds of attraction that different people offer each other. But, refreshingly, it doesn’t become the dominant tale. Sybylla’s writing ambitions remain important, with Augusta urging her to try to get stories published in magazines as an alternative way of supporting herself and her family that would also allow her to retain her independence. The ramifications of her father’s incompetence increase. Bailiffs gradually strip the home of its few valuables and eventually another daughter must be sacrificed – this time to become a governess/maid of all work to a local family – to help manage his debts. The pressure on Sybylla to marry, and marry well, mounts as her friendships with Harry and Frank deepen in different ways. It is a rare and beautiful thing to watch people not flirt but connect by degrees.
Mixed in with these parts most faithful to the novel are more modern elements. A male homosexual relationship, and the terrible fear and misery it brings in a time and place that finds it completely unacceptable, is movingly shown. Nell and her family – especially her sister’s secret relationship with the (white) neighbourhood policeman – demonstrate the forces of racism and colonialism at work. And sexism, if not outright misogyny, is in the air everyone breathes. From the need to get married for security (nicely thrown into relief by the freedom enjoyed by the various widows among the local folk), to Aunt Helen running the household and business for years only to be passed over without a word when it is deemed time for her brother to inherit everything, to Nell’s talents always being assumed to be simply the result of what her father taught her, no woman can escape its effects.
Doran’s creation retains all the book’s sense of defiance but adds a welcome soupcon of more optimism too. It crackles with intelligence and wit, gives all of its characters room to breathe (although it may ultimately be Sybylla’s show, everyone has something meaningful to do and contribute, and the cast is all-round magnificent) and, without ever becoming superficial, never loses its lightness of touch. A joy. A brilliant, brilliant joy.
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My Brilliant Career is on Netflix
