Word: capelja
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These relationships are very male-oriented. If a guy wants a girl, he tells someone to tell her. If she agrees, she is his, body and all. Just anyone can't belong to this exclusive society; the two heroines--Debbie (Nell Schofield) and Sue (Jad Capelja)--come from good middle-class homes, do well at school, and consequently are initially classified as "nerds" (The word means the same in Australian.) The two aspire to join the surfer gang, shedding their morals by cheating on exams, getting drunk, and getting laid...
Throughout the film, the actors give low key performances. Beneath their sun-scorched faces, their eyes reveal their shiftlessness and their painful adolescence that makes them cruel to outsiders and frequently to each other. Capelja's Sue has a relatively easy transformation into a surfer girl--she gets hooked up to a relatively nice, scraggly guy who "screws" her on occasion. Capelja is mellow, a perfect foil for the more turbulent personality of Schofield's Debbie. Schofield faithfully portrays a confused teenager whose parents just don't understand her growing pains, and who reluctantly submits herself to the sexual advances...
...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 eyes these teen-agers are rather...
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