When I love a movie, I really, really love it.  Almost to the point of obsession.  Not only can I watch it over and over again, and quote at length from it, but I think about the characters as real people with whom I have a kind of private relationship.  I guess that's true in a way, at least one way.  I may not have infiltrated their thoughts, but they have certainly affected me and the way I look at life.

There aren't too many films that get to me like this, but one of them is a quiet little Australian work, released in 1991, called Flirting.  It's the sequel to the 1987 film The Year My Voice Broke, which introduced the character of Danny Embling.  These films comprise the first two parts of a planned trilogy by director John Duigan, but 20 years later, the third installment has yet to materialize.  I am so hoping that it will happen.  Please check in with me, Danny - I need to know how you're doing!

In The Year My Voice Broke, it's 1962 in rural Australia, and a very young and gawky Danny (played by Noah Taylor, who virtually defines gawky), a painfully shy and sensitive boy, falls in love with Freya, his best friend.  She's only a little older than Danny, but at that age, even a couple of years can make an enormous difference - the difference between a child's fantasy of love and an adult's reality.  When Freya falls in love with a handsome rugby player who becomes involved in some serious criminal activity, Danny is able to save Freya from disaster, but he also discovers something about her past, and his dreams are dashed when she decides she can no longer live within the confines of their small town.  Although they promise to keep in touch, Freya makes a cameo appearance in Flirting only as a worn photograph tucked away in one of Danny's books.

Flirting catches up with Danny in 1965, and we find that he has been sent by his parents, who feared that he would become a delinquent, to St. Alban's, a boarding school for boys in New South Wales, Australia.  As the film opens, we hear the adult Danny, in voiceover, recalling those days.  (These voiceovers are used throughout the film, to both comic and dramatic effect.)

"I remember the smells most.  Stale lockers with fruitcakes rotting into the wood.  Crusty shoe polish.  Damp towels.  Quink ink for fountain pens.  Disinfectant on the floors of the shower block.  Fresh chalk.  Moldy oranges blue with mildew.  And on a rainy day, the deep, rank, wild smell of discarded football boots."

We also learn that Danny has developed a stutter, and that the letters "h" as in "h-h-heaven" and "w" as in "w-w-women" could "sometimes become unstable".  Of course, he is mocked mercilessly because of this, and he is also given the nickname "Bird", seemingly because of his prominent nose.

He continues, "One thing about boarding school, twenty-four hours a day, you're surrounded.  Either you abandoned yourself and became a herd animal, or you dug a cave deep into your head and skulked inside peering through your eye sockets." 

And then we learn something else about Danny's inner life.  As he lifts his head off of his pillow and looks out the window, he recounts, "At the source of major solace and inspiration, our sister seat of learning, Cirencester Ladies College.  The two schools stared across the lake at each other like...brooding volcanoes.  When I was asleep, I used to leave my body and drift the cold currents to the Cirencester grounds, where I hovered like a dark angel."

As we hover with Danny above Cirencester in the middle of the night, we see a cab approaching.  A young woman, all by herself, is dropped off with her suitcase and walks into the school.  The next morning, this young woman, Thandiwe Adjewa, is surrounded by a group of curious and/or disgusted students, and is awakened by someone asking, "Anyone got a banana?".  (There are ugly racist comments made throughout the movie.  It's offensive, but probably not unrealistic for the time and place.)

Thandiwe is apparently used to being different, not only because of the color of her skin, but because she is actually interested in what's happening in the world outside.  She is the daughter of a Ugandan intellectual, and of a stepmother who is half English and half Kenyan, who is also active in politics. She is sophisticated and worldly, but through a series of conversations with Danny, she comes to see him as a kindred spirit, in spite of his rather provincial upbringing.  He, in turn, begins to question the assumptions he was brought up with. 

Below is a clip which contains one of my favorite scenes from the movie.  As usual for me, it involves music.  A perfectly chosen song or piece of music can lend so much power and visceral emotion to a scene, so it's no suprise that many of my favorite movies involve music or dancing as a way of conveying unspoken (or unspeakable) emotions between characters.

It's the night of the big dance being held at St. Alban's, to which Danny has invited Thandiwe.  Unfortunately, the headmaster, seeing that Danny hasn't had the haircut he was ordered to get, makes Danny return to class.  The boys who are too young to go to the dance, or who haven't invited anyone, look longingly from their classroom window as the girls arrive and descend from their bus in virtual slow motion, looking for all the world like movie star fantasies.  It's played a bit for laughs, but really captures the longing that must have been very real in such a tightly-controlled atmosphere.

Sensing their imminent arrival, Jock Blair tells another boy to cue up a 45 on the turntable and the girls enter the hall (after being exhorted by their chaperone to "Remember that you're all young ladies!") to The Troggs singing "With a Girl Like You" (ba ba ba ba baaaaaaaaa, ba ba ba ba).  Separated by a seemingly endless chasm, sizing each other up, the camera pans down the row of boys, whispering and eyeing their dates hungrily, and then down the row of girls, who seem shyly aware of the power they hold.  You can cut the sexual tension with a knife.  But, this is 1965, and between the panty girdles, the garter belts, and the gloves, along with the ever-watchful eyes of the chaperones, there will be no stolen moments.  Or will there?

Danny and Thandiwe continue their flirtation, managing to survive a misunderstanding resulting from a stolen letter, the resulting duel in the boxing ring, and even a brief appearance by Jean Paul Sartre.

Along the way, there is also an awkward meeting at a school function between Danny's and Thandiwe's parents who, it would seem, couldn't have less in common.  But a brief moment of understanding passes between the two fathers that is incredibly touching in its intimacy. 

A crisis in Uganda (this was during the time that the government was in chaos and Idi Amin was amassing power) forces Danny and Thandiwe apart, but only after a final night that is both tender and poignant.

In fact, the treatment of teenage sexuality in this film, never vulgar, but also not overly sentimental, is  among the most realistic and respectful I have ever seen.  And the complexity of the characters, capable of both incredible cruelty and fierce loyalty, is so absolutely refreshing in a genre that usually contains characters who are the broadest of stereotypes and that goes for the easy laugh.  This is a very quiet movie, with subtleties that reveal themselves only after several viewings.

Aside from the remarkable performances by Taylor and Newton, Nicole Kidman gives a surprising turn as a snobbish senior who begins to realize that there may be more to life than dating the captain of the rugby team. In fact, she has a rather daring sexual secret of her own, and she becomes an unlikely ally of the two fugitive lovers.  Also, look for an impossibly young Naomi Watts as one of Thandiwe's friends.   

The film ends on a hopeful note, even though there is still much left unresolved.  But, as Danny says in the last scene, clutching a long-awaited letter on a rocky, windswept plain, "Suddenly, there were much bigger worlds again, and some small place in them for me."