Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst

Synopsis: A docudrama about the many lives and personae of Florence Broadhurst - one of Australia's most enigmatic characters: singer, dancer, fashion designer, painter, wallpaper queen.

Unfolding Florence has interesting parallels to the even more recently made Hunt Angels about Australian film-maker, Rupert Kathner. Both films are idiosyncratic docudramas about Australian confabulators and artistic identities who weren't averse to lying and grandstanding in order to achieve their goals. Both explore themes of identity and art, and innovative approaches to compositing visuals of actors, animation, archival footage and photographs.

While Hunt Angels' Kathner lived on the run in order to fraudulently finance his film-making, Florence Broadhurst lived on the run from herself. She regularly denied her rural Queensland origins while reinventing herself as an English artist. Whether she was searching more for her true creative identity or for acceptance by the social elite remains unclear. Best known for her wallpaper design career which she began at 60, her framed designs are used as backdrops for a series of interviews about her many personae as a singer, dancer, painter, fund raiser and socialite. In the background is her mysterious, brutal death in October 1977 at the age of 78. Director Gillian Armstrong says she wanted to find a solution to this crime, but the film is foremost a lavishly retold life, with her death an abrupt and puzzling finale.

The screenplay draws on Florence's letters to construct the semi-fictional narration by Florence about her own life and death. The frenetic (sometimes too frenetic) imagining of her life, including animations created from old photographs and footage, is interspersed with the ominous recreation of Florence's last walk to her design studio and factory in Paddington.

Old friends and socialites annotate Armstrong's account of Florence's life with a generally uncritical tone. But other reflections, including her neglected son's perspective, round out the impression of a woman both generous and self-absorbed. She lived in a world sometimes even more fantastic than fiction but had a decisive impact on the real lives of people around her, for better or worse. It is a compelling, although at times unflattering look at the world of the social and artistic elite into which she fearlessly forced entry.

While films like Unfolding Florence and Hunt Angels may not be of huge interest outside Australia, they are a welcome reminder that our own artistic heritage and possible futures are forces to be reckoned with. And they leave the lingering question: how far would you go to get what you want?

 

 

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