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Missy Higgins - News
New Film - Bran Nue Dae
| 08-08-2009 01:46 | 0 reaction(s) | add reaction | add news |
 ON THE eve of the world premiere of Bran Nue Dae, Ernie Dingo likes to recall how it all began. The movie, the closing feature at the Melbourne International Film Festival tonight, is the screen version of a groundbreaking Aboriginal musical first performed in 1989, and Dingo plays the same role he took in the stage production.
He joins a cast that includes Geoffrey Rush, Tom Budge, Deborah Mailman and Magda Szubanski, with singers Missy Higgins, Jessica Mauboy and Dan Sultan making their acting debuts.
Director Rachel Perkins presides over a heightened, high-energy mixture of comedy, absurdity, songs, tap-dancing, irony and romance. It's a work, Dingo says, that is a celebration amid the acknowledgement that ''a lot of negative stuff happens, but it's not dwelled upon. This is how it is, it says, and we're going to have fun.''
Bran Nue Dae, Dingo says, originated in the 1960s, ''when a young boy called Jimmy Chi, sitting down at the pictures in the Sun Theatre in Broome, and watching Grace Kelly and Fred Astaire and Elvis Presley and cowboy movies, thought, 'Why can't those parts be written for Aboriginal people?' ''
Out of that notion, Chi created a stage show with autobiographical elements and a host of musical influences, about Willy, an Aboriginal teenager - played in the film by newcomer Rocky McKenzie - whose mother wants him to be a priest, who pines for his first love, runs away from boarding school, takes to the road and discovers who he is and what he can be.
Dingo is terrific as Uncle Tadpole, a shrewd, enabling figure who meets up with Willy on his journey back to Broome. Reprising the role, he said, there were a few differences, most notably: ''I didn't have to paint the white in my beard on this trip.''
It was important, for him, that there should be a sense of continuity with what had gone before. He would make a point of finding out if members of the crew had seen the original play. If not, he says: ''I would spend a bit of time with them talking about the old stuff, the scenery, the people, the country, introducing them to the culture of Broome.''
While Bran Nue Dae was filming, he says, ''just up the road from us they were shooting Australia, and there we were, that little indigenous project''. Perkins has been involved for several years in getting the project off the ground. Casting, she says, was one of the most straightforward aspects: for most of the roles, ''we thought about the people we'd like to have in it, and we approached them, and they all said yes''.
Geoffrey Rush - who had seen the stage production - brings an idiosyncratic physical energy and an extravagant German accent to the role of a priest at Willy's school, dispensing Cherry Ripes and Cokes with one hand, corporal punishment with the other.
Missy Higgins and Tom Budge are hippies in a decorated Kombi van, tricked by Uncle Tadpole into taking him and Willy on board.
And Jessica Mauboy, Australian Idol 2006 runner-up, brings a sweetness and confidence to the role of Rosie, Willy's first love. Mentored on set by Deborah Mailman, Mauboy says she ''learnt a lot, it really opened me up'', watching the actors and seeing what they brought to their parts.
For Perkins, who has strong memories of the stage show, seeing the film at MIFF was going to be an interesting experience. ''I'm yet to see how an audience connects with it, and whether they get the same sense that I did, sitting in the theatre, that you just wanted to get up and dance.''
The general release date is still not set, and it won't feel right, she adds, ''until it has shown at the Sun Picture Theatre in Broome. But for me, the most important person who should see it was Jimmy Chi. And he has, and he was very happy with it.''
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/08/07/1249350685435.html |
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