Word: surfer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More recently, the Aussie market in America has diversified, featuring futuristic thrillers like Mad Max and The Road Warrior, as well as films depicting current Australian culture. This summer, for instance, Puberty Blues, with its raw portrayal of a distinctly Australian teenage-surfer subculture, arrived on the scene...
...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...
...tightly defined peer subculture. The heroines perceptions are warped by their fascination with being accepted, and their desires for freedom are quelled not by authority figures like parents but by their own burgeoning awareness of their own needs--which do not necessarily include belonging to the cool surfer clique: We identify with Debbie and Sue because their struggles with independence are fresh and vivid, and at times terribly frustrating. Beresford doesn't condemn these characters. Rather he reaffirms our beliefs that puberty isn't just cuddling around a sparkling campfire...
...Gere's characterization. Jean-Paul Belmondo played the petty crook as a Bogart clone, sardonic and dour. Gere takes his beat from Jerry Lee Lewis records. He is an instinctive anarchist moving to a wild rock pulse, and such thoughts as he has are supplied by Silver Surfer, the comic-book character. That, in particular, is a superb invention, giving the film a compulsive rhythm that drives out comparisons and forces the audience to judge the film on its own terms...