Up Under

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE GETTING OF WISDOM Directed by Bruce Beresford Screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe

THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH Directed and Written by Fred Schepisi

For decades Australian cinema, like the country itself, led the world in woolgathering. Then, in the early '70s, Australian film stepped into the international limelight. None of the movies was a masterpiece, but in sum they suggested a nation of natural-born film makers with a respect for narrative form and a deft way with actors. These artists have created today's most vital national cinema.

As Australia has discovered film, it has rediscovered its own past. Some of the finest Australian films (Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant) are set on the cusp of the 20th century, when the country was approaching federation and its citizens were struggling for an identity apart from that of decorous Mother England. This was a country in adolescent turbulence. No wonder, then, that so many Australian novels (and now films) are tales of young nonconformists seeking liberation through maturity or anarchy. In The Getting of Wisdom, a bright upstart triumphs over the snobbery of her classmates; in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, an engaging half-caste succumbs to racism and flails into psychopathy.

Laura Tweedle Rambotham (Susannah Fowle) is the new girl at the Ladies' College, where the daughters of Melbourne's elite pass their time giggling over passages from the Song of Solomon, gorging themselves on "scrummy" (scrumptious) scones and honing their Olympian disdain for anyone not of good family. The school is a microcosm of colonial society: the rich Anglified girls lording it over a poor Aussie with a quick wit. Laura doesn't fit: she is too thin and gawky, too smart and eager. In an attempt to see Laura's world through her eyes, Director Beresford turns the other girls into vaudeville minxes and betrays a weakness for the ingratiating visual cliche. But the film sparks to life when Laura falls in with--and into heroine-worshiping love with--Evelyn (Hilary Ryan), a beautiful, dark-eyed senior classwoman who is everything Laura hopes to become. In one lovely scene, Evelyn beckons the girl to join her in bed. They pull the covers up and embrace; it is a moment of delicate sensuousness, chastely observed as if through the veil of memory.

Looking at Hollywood and Australian movies, one would hardly guess that blacks compose 12% of the U.S. population, and aborigines only 1% of the Australian. Their film makers are fascinated by the native blacks, seeing in them a vanishing innocence and mystical strength. Jimmie Blacksmith, based on Thomas Keneally's novel, shows the violent underside of the aboriginal experience. In 1900 an easygoing laborer (Tommy Lewis), born of a black woman and a white man, went on a murder spree, killing seven whites. Adapter Schepisi places this lurid swatch of history at an epic remove. Psychology interests him less than physical details: the look of fugitive figures on a hillside, or the way Jimmie slips through the kind of wooden fence he once built, while his aboriginal half brother vaults lithely over it. This vignette approach makes the movie seem longer than it is, and Schepisi's preoccupation with the balletics of bloodletting leaves the final impression that Jimmie Blacksmith is a handsome exploitation picture with a telegraphed message.

Both films were made in 1977. Since then, Beresford has made two impressive melodramas, The Money Movers and Breaker Morant; Schepisi is now preparing his first American film, a Willie Nelson western. Even in their early, uneven films, these directors helped reveal the rich promise of Australian cinema. Later films have made good on that promise. By Richard Corliss

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