The Sapphires

Synopsis: When a roving Irishman, Dave (Chris O’Dowd), discovers Aboriginal sisters, Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Mauboy) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) singing in a talent contest at an outback pub he convinces them to swap country & western for soul, promising to make them stars. He’s as good as his word but it means going to Vietnam to sing for the American troops.

If you’ve been to the movies at all in the last few weeks then you probably will have seen the extensively-aired trailer for The Sapphires. It’s the sort of preview that tells you all that there is to tell about a film – in its case, that it’s an all-stops-out crowd-pleaser with a jukebox soundtrack and a feel-good zero-to-hero narrative. The good news is that whilst all that is true, it’s actually pretty good.

Adapted from a 2005 play by Tony Briggs, who wrote the screenplay with Keith Thompson, it is based on the real-life odyssey of Briggs’s mother and three aunts from an outback Aboriginal mission to Vietnam, barely a year after a referendum gave citizenship rights to indigenous Australians.

Directed by actor, theatre director and first-time filmmaker, Wayne Blair, it is an upbeat charmer with excellent performances, impressive production values and a terrific clutch of 60s soul hits. Although one can’t help but feel, at least at times, that the real life story has been over-romanticized and subsumed by political tendentiousness and regret in places that Blair trowels on the heart-warming sentimentality so thickly, there’s no denying that the film has plenty of sparkle. Everything about the production, from script to costume design and lighting (Warwick Thornton, director of Samson & Delilah was D.O.P) works to bring this about. Despite a limited budget even the re-creation of war-torn Vietnam is impressively staged.

Like Muriel’s Wedding, The Sapphires is not so much a musical as a film in which the music is an integral element. Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell are excellent as the four singers, with Mauboy doing a first class job carrying the lead vocal part. The outstanding stroke of good fortune, however, was the casting of Chris O’Dowd as the girl’s manager. His self-deprecating Oirish sense of humour (the character as originally written was English) is infectious and he makes for a delightfully amusing contrast to Mailman's irascible Gail.

Given the huge popularity of television talent shows like Australian Idol (Mauboy was one of its finalists in 2006), and The Voice amongst younger people, The Sapphires with its seamless road to fame (Vietcong mortars aside) should resonate with starry-eyed youngsters, whilst older audiences will appreciate the trip back to the days when pop music really did have soul. Let’s hope that, like the 2010 indigenous musical Bran Nue Dae, the film wins audience it well deserves.

 

 

Want more about this film?

    

Want something different?