Friday Five: Gems from The Sapphires

The Sapphires (2012)

Dir: Wayne Blair

This is what every review will say about this film: ‘feel-good Australian version of Dreamgirls, loosely based on a true story’. That’s because it’s actually quite accurate. Four girls (three sisters and their cousin) sing cute harmonies in 1958 at a concert in the Cummeragunja Mission, a remote outback station. Cut to 1968 (via images of the times – protest marches; JFK; Muhammad Ali) and they are a poor aboriginal family living in a shack, but clean and loved, and singing around the house.

They want to go to the local town to sing in a talent quest, although Julie (Jessica Mauboy) isn’t allowed to go because she’s too young, although she’s the best singer. The other sisters try to hitch a lift but end up walking. “It’s because we’re black” says the oldest, Gail (Deborah Mailman) matter-of-factly. “No, it’s because you’re ugly” replies Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), setting the tone. There is no self-pity, but there is plenty of attitude.

 

The talent quest is a joke, compèred by the fabulous Chris O’Dowd as drunken Irish soul devotee, Dave Lovelace. Julie joins the girls on stage as they are about to sing and they perform a Merle Haggard song – beautifully. But half of the audience leave. Overt racism ensures the winner is a woman with a woeful rendition of a Carpenters number. Lovelace knows this is a travesty – “Country music is not my thing, but those girls can sing!” He’s sacked for his dissent and drunkenness; he needs a job; they need a manager; it’s a match made in Cummeragunja.

The Cummeragunja Songbirds

The girls see an advert for singers wanted to perform for the forces in Vietnam and they want to audition but they need their cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) to complete them, so they go to the city to recruit her. She is at a Tupperware party with her white friends who shut the door in Aboriginal faces, but she breaks away from them to rejoin her old group. They begin to practice, and it’s all about the singing.

Chris O’Dowd steals the show as he has great delivery and he gets all the best lines. He persuades the girls they need him – “Without me, there’s no you” – and he gets them the gig through an unscrupulous promoter, Myron (Don Battee). He teaches the girls about soul, and if it seems odd that a white Irish man is preaching soul music to black women who aren’t even included in their national census, the irony is entirely intentional.

Chris O'Dowd as Dave Lovelace - he's a soul man!

They get the gig; they change their name to The Sapphires (from the Cummeragunja Songbirds); they go to Vietnam; they sing. The music is good and the playlist includes fantastic numbers such as Hold On, I’m Coming, Who’s Loving You?, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, I’ll Take You There, and What a Man. The comic contrast between their natural accents and the poignant numbers they belt out is reminiscent of the regional dissonance in The Commitments.

 

One, Two, Three, Four!

Dave wants them to ‘entertain’ the troops: the costumes must be “classy with cleavage”. Sexy Cynthia takes the diversion a little too far, a charming but clumsy Marine falls (literally) for Kay, and Julie just soaks up all the experience and reflects it in her amazing voice. The attitude is sensuous and compassionate (skinniness is dull and distant) and when Martin Luther King is shot, the girls perform their most soulful show ever after Dave tells them, “Tell me how a black marine feels tonight. I know you’re hurting but I need you to sing.”

 

Relationships are formed and broken, but this is the weaker part of the film. Kay and Gail fight, and we learn the source of their difference when Gail accuses her pale-skinned cousin of only being black now there’s money in it. We realise how unfair this is when a flashback to 1958 shows the government cars pulling up at that original concert. Kay is taken as part of the Stolen Generation because she can “pass as white”.

 

Gail failed in her duty to look after her and suffers regret and bitterness, accusing Kay of turning from them, although she was raised independently and only allowed to see them at her mother’s funeral. When the military escort pulls out of Vietnam abandoning the girls to the violence, Gail again feels the burden of being in charge.

 

 

What is really unbelievable is the relationship between Gail and Dave. They spar verbally from the start, but no sparks fly. He describes her as a “mouth on legs – a defensive, argumentative old witch”, but this is understandable because she’s a “momma bear looking after baby cubs”. Yes, it’s understandable, but it doesn’t make her loveable and the improbable romance is unconvincing, appearing tacked on to the end for a cheesy finish.

 

Indeed, the entire ending is cheesy, as the girls return to perform in their home town and we see the four stars of the Southern Cross in the sky above. The four stars turn into the ‘original’ Sapphires (in case we missed the point): sisters Laurel Robinson and Lois Peeler, and their cousins Beverley Briggs and Naomi Mayers. The film is a lighthearted fluff piece with a few deeper issues and a great soundtrack which probably worked better in its original theatre form. As all the other reviews have already said.

 

5 Great Lines from Dave Lovelace:

1. "Do you sing anything other than that country and western shite?"
2. "This may have escaped your notice, but you’re black, and you’re singing country and western. It’s just wrong."
3. “90% of recorded music is shite. The rest is soul.”
4. “When I met you, you were doing that country and western thing, and that’s fine; we all make mistakes.”
5. “Country and Western is about loss. So is Soul. But In Country and Western you’ve lost, given up, and are sitting at home whining about it. Soul is about struggling with everything you’ve got to get it back.”

Quote for Today: Taking Sandwiches for a Walk

“She detested picnics: essentially one took a pile of sandwiches for a walk, settled oneself on a scratchy tartan rug, then waited for the wasps to show up.” - Anthony Quinn, Half of the Human Race

Capital Concerns: Museum of London (Part Four)

To celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, the exhibition ‘At Home with the Queen’ displays photos of people with their memorabilia. Some are with pictures of themselves meeting HRH on walkabout, or receiving Maundy coins in recognition of their services as a volunteer. A child plays with a Happyland Royal Wedding set; a man is surrounded by themed cushions, hats and magazines; a woman stands in front of a Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen poster; a family group wear royal facemasks; but my favourite are the hand-knitted Queen and Duke of Edinburgh dolls.

The City of London (Square Mile) is home to fewer than 10,000 residents, but 340,000 people arrive to work on weekdays. In a room dominated by the Lord Mayor’s Coach (used annually in the Lord Mayor’s Show), these people are celebrated. First the coach, which is decorated with lions and dragons, cherubs representing Africa, Asia, America and Europe, tritons and a sheep.

Next, the workers – there are cycle couriers, taxi drivers, police officers, and emergency services. The safety helmet worn by a BT bridge engineer carrying out emergency repair work after the 1993 IRA bombing is a touching exhibit. There are traders, accountants, lawyers, cleaners, teachers and pupils – there’s one primary school and three independent schools in the district. There are gardeners, construction workers, messengers, sandwich-makers, clerics, personal trainers, beauticians, and waiters – all making up the professions of this city community.

Architecture models reveal the changing face of the cityscape – St Paul’s Cathedral (1710); The Houses of Parliament (1840-1870); The London Eye (2000); The Gherkin (2004); The London Aquatic Centre (2017). It’s not all jolly – interpretive panels point out the economy suffered, the dock complex moved down-river, and riots broke out. Some artistic works focus on the dark side – History Painting (1993-4) by John Bartlett takes the poll tax riot as its subject, and Viaduct (1998) by Michael Johnson is a modern wasteland.

London Fields East - The Ghetto by Tom Hunter and James McKinnon

London Fields East – The Ghetto (1994) by Tom Hunter and James McKinnon is an eye-catching concept of deprivation. In the scale model of Ellingfort Road and London Lane in Hackney, photos and tiny furniture (bins and bicycles) form a dolls’ house squat. We can see through some windows into empty rooms; others are boarded up and pasted over with ironic advertising for products these tenants could never afford. London may be recovering financially but Capital Concerns reminds us the population is 7.5 million Londoners, and rising – a statistic that can cause serious complications.

Friday Five: Shaking All Over

I first noticed it during NYPD Blue. It was okay then because I used to watch it while doing the ironing – this was before I gave it up (ironing that is) – so didn’t have to watch the screen too closely.

Friends’ home movies also used to make me feel a bit ill, but I presumed this was just because they were subjecting me to footage of their children in a paddling pool or some interminably dull wedding speech. So I’d usually had a couple of drinks to brace myself for the ordeal.

When I was reviewing films for a critics’ website in Wellington, I had a free pass to all the films in the festival, which was excellent. Except for when I went to watch Half Nelson. It was not a bad film but I found myself sweating and nauseous. If it weren’t for the fact that I had to review it, I would have walked out of the cinema. As it was, I barely made it out of the auditorium before chundering in the toilets. I thought I’d picked up a virus. When I mentioned it to my editor, he said blithely, “I didn’t know you suffered from cinema vertigo”. Huh?

It seems I am not alone. Many people are highly sensitive to the technique not-so-affectionately known as Queasycam. It’s that handheld, shaky, blurry effect that leaves you with a distorted point of focus and can cause gross discomfort in the viewer with feelings akin to violent travel sickness. Yes, I am highly susceptible to it. So are lots of other people.

There is a website where viewers can rate the nausea-factor of films. This is a great idea allowing you to check before going whether it is worth it, or whether you will simply spend $20 to vomit on your neighbour. Several people are campaigning to have warnings put on these films – seriously, if you have warnings about strobe lights; this technique induces powerfully negative results also.

The technique is supposedly avant-garde, and I can see where it might work in a film like The Blair Witch Project, which is universally recognized as the worst offender. I couldn’t watch this (not because I was scared, but because I felt so sick) but I understand that it was a suspense-building device highlighting the supposition that this was being filmed by amateurs. Similarly Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity.

Some people have difficulties with the Bourne franchise, although these don't bother me too much - it's dodgy focus issues rather than swift jump-cuts that get my gorge rising. Of course, it's up to the individual director how they want to shoot their film, but if they are tripod-intolerant, they are generally shooting themselves in the foot.

Recently I went to see Beasts of the Southern Wild. I had heard great things about it, and it has the potential to be an excellent film. But no one warned me about the nebulous camera-work, and it ruined what could have been a great piece of cinema. Why would you do that? Even a non-queasycam suffering viewer will spend the whole time thinking about the artifice rather than the art of the story. I don’t get it. I want it to stop. But at the very least, I want to have the choice to avoid the motion-sickness picture.

5 Films That Made Me Sick:

1. The Blair Witch Project - everyone's favourite culprit
2. Cloverfield - it's hard to hold the camera steady when there's a monster on the loose
3. Half Nelson - I have the intelligence and imagination to believe he has a drug habit; I don't need to experience the effects too
4. Beasts of the Southern Wild - and it could have been so good...!
5. The Tree of Life - it wasn't just the camera-work that made me ill; the whole thing was a pretentious cup of cold sick

The City of the People of the World: Museum of London (Part Three)

A timeline of events and quotes contains photographs and costumes – dresses, Pearly King and Queen outfits – and a picture of Bolton winning the FA Cup Final at Wembley.

“It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable or cheerful or easy or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.” Henry James, 1869

“If I stand for a moment under the pavement in the heart of London… the great avenues of civilization meet here and strike this way and that. I am in the heart of life.” Virginia Woolf from The Waves (1931)

Meanwhile, the dates: Jack the Ripper stalks the city (1888); Tower Bridge is completed (1894); New Zealand grants women the vote (1894); Harrod’s store installs London’s first escalator (1898) – nervous shoppers are offered smelling salts – Queen Victoria dies (1901); The Ritz opens (1906); London hosts its first Olympic Games (1908); World War I begins (1914); Votes for Women (1918).

Selfridge's lift - sheer hedonism

Carlo Gatti’s Italian ice cream house combined the taste of a treat with the face of immigration. Selfridge’s bronze lift is on display – introduced in 1928 and operated by a uniformed young woman. Displays such as this, and images of the Savoy, highlight the disparity of rich and poor. This was the era of prostitution and suicide. Women took work as baby farmers, laundry facilitators, and matchbox assemblers. Men were brickmakers, or dockers, and unemployment benefit was introduced in 1911. Water pumps were made available and public baths were run by the Council as part of the war against disease, smell, dirt and lice.

Banners from the Salvation Army and Barnardo’s indicate that some attempts were made to relieve the poor. Charles Booth’s Map of Poverty (1889-1891) is on display. It divides London street-by-street into socio-economic areas defined as ‘semi-criminal’, ‘very poor’, ‘poor’, ‘mixed’, ‘fairly comfortable’, ‘middle class’ and ‘upper middle class’.

An array of his volunteers walked the streets taking notes for the survey to enable the categories to be imposed. A rough working-class area was defined as one with open doors, broken windows, prostitutes, thieves, and ‘a row always going on between warlike mothers’. Flowerpots, lace curtains, scrubbed doorsteps and hanging birdcages were the ‘hallmarks of a respectable neighbourhood’.

Displays include the Illustrated Police News with a story on the Whitechapel Murders, Suffragette posters and banners, WWII propaganda posters, travelling trunks and gas masks, bomb fragments, ration books, and photos of the blitz – bomb shelters made out of tube stations, and buses among the rubble. St Paul’s Cathedral was a symbol of hope during the war and remains the heart of London for some. A film of Jewish immigrants explains that they worked as domestic servants because ‘compared with instant death, it was a glorious opportunity’.

There is a mock-up of the Lyon’s tea rooms and a couple of gorgeous paintings by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson – Amongst the Nerves of the World (1930), and London, Winter (1928). Even street furniture was changing with the introduction of the K2 telephone kiosk: Giles Gilbert Scott won the GPO competition to design one in 1926 and, although he wanted them to be green and silver, they had to be red to stand out more and constitute less of a hazard. Traffic lights were introduced to assist motorists, and a model of the underground/overground reveals the complexities of that particular endeavour.

Amongs the Nerves of the World by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson

Museum items tell stories: the toy coach souvenir of the Coronation; the fashion over the ages of winklepickers, kitten heels, platform shoes and Dr Marten’s boots; the freedom and statement implied in a Vespa; the Mary Quant dresses of Swinging London; and the end of National Service leading to fears of juvenile delinquency.

A trolley from Heathrow airport indicates global Londoners, and they do come from everywhere: 250 languages are spoken in London and 20% of Londoners are of ethnic minority. Protest placards, silver jubilee memorabilia and psychedelic clothing embrace this diversity – you have a ‘punk’ outfit of mohair jumper and bondage trousers beside a ‘Vexed generation’ hijab to demonstrate that this is ‘the city of the people of the world’.

Rising from the Ashes: Museum of London (Part Two)

After the Great Fire, all buildings had to be made of brick or stone. Bridges built at Westminster and Blackfriars spread growth south of the river. The docks were established in 1800. Regent Street and Trafalgar Square added to the grandeur of the city. A side exhibit has the pleasure gardens revealing people parading in masks, bonnets, flamboyant costumes and hats – such as the design of a ship or antlers. The gardens had outdoor lighting, food and drink, tree-lined walks and often an orchestra. Many cities copied London and called their gardens Vauxhall, after the most famous gardens of all.

With fans, pistols, jewellery and a wonderful display of shoes, the Museum stresses that London’s manufacturing industries were thriving; it had more shops than any other European city (hence Napoleon’s ‘nation of shopkeepers’ jibe) and needed skilled immigrants. Workers in the same trades in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the continent formed associations and unions for better pay and conditions. In 1776 the wages of workmen in London were double those of their counterparts in Edinburgh.

Exhibits from this era include Anne Fanshawe’s dress (the embroidered hops, barley, anchors and bales represent Anne’s father’s trade as a brewer and a Merchant of the City of London), musical clocks, fine glassware, a dentist’s surgery (complete with tools, medicines, spectacles and teeth), a tailor’s workshop, the Blackett dolls’ house (with hand-painted wallpaper and a spit-roasting mechanism in the kitchen), and a wax diorama by Samuel Percy of Turk’s Coffee House in the Strand where folk were meeting to discuss ideas.

Anne Fanshawe's dress

The Blackett's dolls' house

Wallpaper detail

There’s an admission form from the Foundling Hospital where mothers left children they couldn’t afford to raise – a piece of cloth was cut in two; one half given to the mother; the other left with the child in the hope of being reclaimed (very few ever were). There is also a door from Newgate Prison and the walls of a Wellclose prison cell, carved with pictures of houses and churches, and a poem from 1759 which declares, ‘The cup is empty/ To Our sorrow/ But hope it will/ Be full tomorrow.’ Positivity in adversity!

Among items from this ‘new city’ are reminders of its foundations; portraits of Omai and Benelong; a Royal Standard barge banner; a pair of paintings by Henry Nelson O’Neal – Eastward Ho! (a colourful depiction of cheerful, smiling soldiers, kissing wives and babies as they board a ship in Gravesend leaving to fight in the ‘Indian Mutiny’, or first Indian War of Independence), and the companion work, Home Again as they return, many wounded.

Eastward Ho! by Henry Nelson O'Neal



Home Again by Henry Nelson O'Neal

A work from the Community Link course at Barnet College entitled Goods from the British Empire is a cotton tablecloth bearing china cups containing silk, sugar and coffee (the building was originally a warehouse for such goods), representing both the positive exploratory aspects of Empire and the negative associations such as slavery.

You can stroll along the reconstructed Victorian Walk with a pawn broker’s, pub, bank, pharmacy, and tailor’s. The gentleman’s outfitters contain cloth, tweed, silks, suits, collars, coats, trousers and top-hats, with the paraphernalia to make them – scissors, tape measures, rulers, fashion plates, dressmaker’s dummies, buttons, and twists of material and thread. There is also a milliner’s, a barber’s, a tobacconist, a stationer’s (with cards, post cards and paper dolls), a grocer’s (with biscuit boxes, scales for measuring, and glass and earthenware jars), and a toyshop (with trains, dolls, puzzles, toy soldiers, marbles, and an ark with all the animals).

The Victorian Walk, looking a lot like Diagon Alley

There’s a baker’s, a confectioner’s, a tea and coffee warehouse, a glass showroom (with stunning glasses, decanters and mosaics), and a watch-maker’s. I love all their writing desks and sets of drawers. The street is furnished with lampposts, a penny-farthing, an old urinal, a cart/wagon, a piano organ, and beer bottle boxes and barrels.

I liked the Eight Day Regulator Clock from 1860, exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862. It shows the time in GMT and has 24-hour dials for Sydney, Madras, New York, Canton, Calcutta, Paris, St Petersburg and Constantinople.

Great Walls and Fire! Museum of London (Part One)

The Museum of London had been recommended to me by my super-in-law, so I took a tube there one day while in the city.

As the Olympics have been held in London three times, and everyone has caught the fever, there was an exhibition in the foyer on the subject. This one hopes to be the most sustainable games to date – for example, the top ring of the Olympic stadium is made from surplus gas pipes.

I skipped through exhibitions about London before London and Roman London (not literally skipped, you understand, that would be weird). The city was burned in AD60 by Boudicca and was then rebuilt and expanded. By AD100 it replaced Colchester as the capital of Britannia. Glass cases contained bones and pottery, models of amphitheatres, stone sculpture tools, coins and horseshoes, but I was being selective, and pressed on.

I was intrigued by the remaining part of the London Wall, however. The first fort was built in AD120 for the soldiers in Londinium. There were remaining mosaics from AD 200 when these walls were strengthened and incorporated into a city wall to protect London. In AD410 the Romans abandoned London; the city declined as it was empty for nearly 400 years and the wall began to collapse.

The Saxons moved in (in AD886), repaired the walls, and added towers for extra protection against Viking attack. They built houses right up against the wall, but they were destroyed in the Great Fire of London (1666). In the nineteenth century, warehouses and shops again abutted the wall. World War II bombing caused extensive damage to both the wall and the buildings, and when archaeologists dug up the ruins, they found sections of the original wall, one of which is displayed here, looking secretive in the summer sunshine. I love how the stones are steeped in history.

Real children were playing in a reconstructed house in the Medieval Britain section. Here the displays feature weapons, keys, chain mail, pottery, preserved doors and altarpieces, rings, paintings, books, manuscripts (bibles and primers from the 1400s) and illustrated letters. There’s a collection of London Delftware pottery, and the Cheapside Hoard, a treasure of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewels discovered in 1912 under the cellar floor of a seventeenth century house in Cheapside.

Again, I raced through this bit, but was morbidly interested by the display on the Plague, Black Death and Pestilence caused by the stink and filth of the city. The ‘War Plague and Fire’ section also interested me as it has a model of the Rose Theatre from 1587 and the three copper plates of the 1559 Copper Plate Map – fifteen plates made up a map of London, and only these three survive, although there is no contemporary printed map.

Oliver Cromwell’s death mask is also on display here. He is claimed to have said, in a 1656 interview, “I am as much for a government by consent as any man; but where shall we find that consent?”

London was teeming – furniture, models of 1660s timber houses, and pictures of the Great Fire illustrate this state. Donald Lupton wrote in London and the Countrey (1632), “London is the great beehive of Christendom... she swarms with people of all ages, natures, sexes, callings... she seems to be a glutton, for she desires always to be full.”

One-fifth of the population died in 1665 due to the Great Plague. In an effort to ward it off, people wore bunches of herbs; lavender, cloves, and pommo d’ambre (a mixture of whale vomit, animal scents and flowers – thought to be efficacious). And then came the Great Fire.

London booksellers stored all their books and papers in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral for safety, but it was covered in wooden scaffolding which caught fire, the lead in the roof melted, the cathedral burned down, and everything was destroyed. Fortunately London Bridge had a gap between shops in it (from a previous fire), which prevented the fire from spreading to Southwark, and causing further loss of life.

The gaolers took pity on the debtors in prison at Newgate, and released them to fend for themselves. People pulled down houses and Charles II himself helped with throwing water on the conflagration which raged for five days, destroying 13,000 homes – the King arranged for bread to be delivered each day to feed the many homeless.