Cinema
Soft porn
Peter Ackroyd
Puberty Blues (`AA', selected cinemas) Australia has more male transvestites per head of population than any other country in the world; I mention this as the only interesting fact I know about that country. Certainly it seems to me more significant than the windy nonsense now being written about it as the cultural saviour of the West, a sort of California with ar- tistic pretensions. And this confusion of sexual identity is the only real way of mak- ing sense of Puberty Blues, an Australian film which does for teenage sexuality what the Inquisition did for Roman Catholicism.
From the posters which advertise this film, a casual spectator might be lured into the cinema in the belief that he is about to see a conventional pornographic film: a young girl is unzipping what look like a pair of hot pants, while behind her a group of teenage boys clutch their surfing boards as if they were participants in some tumescent phallic ritual. 'Getting It Can Be Fun', runs the slogan — but 'it' is, under the cir- cumstances, really only a synonym for `bored'.
The film concerns the sexual adventures, misadventures rather, of a group of young Australian surfers and their 'chicks' or `molls'. They operate from an area known as 'Green Hills', although the beach itself seems to be surrounded by a housing estate of appalling vulgarity. Two teenage girls, Debbie and Sue, aspire to join this gang of surferettes because 'if you weren't a surfer chick you were nobody'. Being a 'some- body' simply means being some body, since the girls themselves spend their time lying on the beach and waiting for their blond men-folk to come out of the water and start assaulting or abusing them.
The narrative itself falls into the usual, cinematic trap of portraying adolescent life as both more difficult and dangerous than `adult' existence, as the surfers explore regions of sex, narcotics and even death, which are unknown to their parents. But It is all done in a somewhat oblique manner, so that the ordinary pornographic audience will go away disappointed: the only titilla- tion provided for them comes in the shaPe of a few naked buttocks, and a scene of some girls taking a 'stretching class' at their school. But for those who like their pornography in a more advanced and corrupt form' Blues will come as a positive masterpiece. It shows all the signs of the sexual confusion which seems to be endemic in Australian culture, a confusion, which leads to insecurity and to brutalisa- tion. The male surfers themselves seem quite unable to deal with their own sexualt- ty, and as a result treat their girlfriends with an equal measure of fear and of contentln. They are aggressive and callow, using the girls only for what the Australians ap- parently call 'rooting', a sexual act which they perform with the maximum of haste and the minimum of contact. They ob- viously never enjoy it, and are far haPPler messing around with each other in the water, the girls out of sight.
And what do the girls do when they are alone? They play the role which has been imposed upon them by their uptight boyfriends. 'We were busting to go to the lavatory,' one of them says, without a trace of irony, in her frank Australian manner, `but that was too rude for us girls.' This must be one of the few films now on release where sexual stereotypes can be presented on the screen without overt embarrassment or a trace of self-consciousness. When the girls are not being abused by their boys, they get drunk or fight each other. For although this film has tw° women in its credits as producers, what We get here are a series of infantile male fan" tasies of the way women are — aggressive and unpredictable, representing a force which has at all costs to be ridiculed or kept firmly in place. But a film about female sex' uality which relies implicitly 0°11 stereotypes of femininity is bound to tie itself into knots: and so instead of the frank presentation of ordinary sexuality — might be familiar but would also be convin: cing — we get a timorous and frightened sexuality, twisted out of shape and fashion' ed into modes of prurience or brutality, a matter of hints and whispers. Puberty Blues has been compared,' because of its subject matter, with such `teenage' films as Gregory's Girl or the American film Porky s. But the COn!" parison is not in the Australian film's favour: because sexuality is still seen as °, dangerous and threatening force, it canne`
be treated with the irony or gentle humour of the English film just as it cannot be presented with the frank and quite unselfconscious crudity of the American Picture. What we have here is something More insidious: a film in which the ordinary relations between the sexes are treated either as an unpleasant necessity or a loveless activity which produces only tears and grief.
The director, Bruce Beresford, has not redeemed his film with any charm of man- ner or proficiency of technique. You have only to watch television in the afternoons to know how bad Australian acting can be and, because the sexual tensions of the film remain confused and unresolved, the nar- rative itself lacks life or shape; it is simply arranged into a number of loosely fitting episodes. I have noticed before the curious impersonality of the Australian cinema: it does not seem able to deal with human behaviour in a convincing or dramatic way, and turns instead to parody or to fantasy to shape its material. When human passions are involved they tend to be flattened out, With a harshness of presentation and an abruptness of form which have the same ef- fect as a nervous tic, getting faster and faster as the emotions come closer to the surface. It is possible, I suppose, that Mr Beresford was attempting to show the vacancy and alienation of teenagers in Australia, but I doubt it. The vacancy runs deeper than that, and has more to do with the culture from which this film has come.
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