Word: beresfords
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FRANKIE AVALON and Annette Funicello would not recognize the teenage beach culture depicted in Bruce Beresford's Puberty Blues. In this Australian import, the surfers and their girls don't sing and dance blissfully, and they certainly don't undergo innocuous adventures cuddling under the moonlight...
Their adventures are rough as they scratch and claw their way to the ranks of the in-crowd. Beresford lets on that this is only a phase the girls are experiencing, but he doesn't spare them any pain, as they deceive their parents, get suspended from school, and stagnate with their new friends...
Australian Director Bruce Beresford approaches the adolescent surfing culture of a Sydney suburb as if he were an anthropologist and his subjects were an exotic outback tribe. But the somewhat distant and objective manner that served so effectively to dehydrate his Tender Mercies fails him here. Two girls (prettily played by Nell Schofield and Jad Capelja) scheme to gain admission to the gang, win acceptance and then at last outgrow the group. The tale is not told with great dramatic intensity. Nor is it really as strange and shocking as Beresford seems to think it is. Indeed, to jaded American...
Directed by Bruce Beresford...
...Bruce Beresford, the Australian director making his American film debut, is no subtle stylist. His tendency is to run like hell with a single visual strategy: flossy soft focus in The Getting of Wisdom, low-angled shots for the heroes and villains of Breaker Morant, hyperactive camerabatics to catch the footballers in The Club, and, to emphasize the lonely helplessness of Mac and his kind, a series of longshot landscapes that dwarf the actors. But with his jeweler's eye for casting and a fond patience with his actors, he allows every performance in Tender Mercies to shine through...