Product: Flirting [VHS] (1992)
Rating: 4.0
Different, Fresh, Eye-Popping
Too tired of Hollywood's overdone coming-of-age fused + love themes? Well, Flirting, despite its superfluous title which almost misled me, is a complex film with a heavy touch of sincerity and authenticity. One of those rare films which really give the audience a creepy sensation of gaping at characters' on-going lives as if peeping from the small window of a dark room, the main "flirting" grows between 2 misfits from 2 worlds as distant as an all-boy school and an all-girl school sitting across a lake.Wonderful acting here by Noah Taylor who breathes the air of a stuttering outsider--Danny Embling, a much teased "geek" who finds solace in mental superiority in a conformitist boarding school setting. Also, before moving onto bigger things such as Beloved, Thandie Newton portrays a fiery Ugandan beauty very much ostracised by her racist surroundings. What nourishes the feeble threat that first hold the two lonely hearts together is their shared vision of intellectual, political, as well as sexual freedom. An odd romance springs between the two as they carry on subtle flirting on debate teams, across the lake as DAnny rows to another midnite rendezvous, and eventually an exploration of the body that is by no means marred by its intensity.Certainly without the banal lightheartedness of jovial teen movies made too frequently in the U.S., director John Duigan masters the art of manipulating an audience in this 1991 film, also featuring a young Nicole Kidman, brilliant in her pivotal role of a supressed head girl carefully protecting the fragile young love she senses Danny and Thandiwe. Dark and deep into youthful souls, Flirting brings to mind serious matters such as Uganda's Idi Amin years. Our star-crossed young lovers never whisper the sweet word "love" into each other's ears, yet through every touch and every glimpse, the audience is led into a sweet realm of love in its purest form w/out being tainted by physical emphasis, but rather decorated with lavish strokes of reality--Danny and Thandiwe's compromise between lust and respect.