My Brilliant Career

[osprey_archer]

My Brilliant Career is sort of Anne of Green Gables by way of Australia. It’s not so much that the story follows the same pattern, or even that the heroines are all that similar, but nonetheless they share a vibe. Naturally I very much enjoyed it.

A capsule description makes Anne and Sybylla sound quite similar: they’re both spirited young girls with artistic leanings. But where Anne is a sensitive, imaginative chatterbox, Sybylla is basically a straight-up hoyden, which is a different kind of delightful. There’s a wonderful scene where she and a young man (who is, of course, romantically interested in her) have a running pillow fight through the house (beginning when Sybilla drops a pillow out the window onto his head), and out into the fields, and end by collapsing in the grass.

There’s also a great scene where she pushes a pompous Englishman into a sheepfold when he has the audacity to propose to her. And another scene where she rocks a boat so that both she and the young man in it end up falling into the lake. Basically there’s some high quality “Sybylla discourages her suitors” action all through the movie.

Now the one caveat I will add is that the title led me to expect Sybylla to actually take concrete career-building steps at some point - sailing to Paris to study on the Left Bank or at least running away to Melbourne to become an actress - but although from the very first moment she talks about her desire for a career, she doesn’t actually do anything about it till the very end. So don’t go into it expecting much from that angle.

Comments

[kore]

This movie (Judy Davis! Sam Neill! Directed by Gillian Armstrong!) is so great, altho I haven't seen it recently. I loved the book a long while ago too. I think there's more about her literary life in My Career Goes Bung, which was published much, much later, but it's also been a while since I read that one -- in the mid-eighties, after I saw the movie. But it's very different from the first book, from what I remember.