The Year My Voice Broke

John Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke stands out from other coming of age films because of its simple honesty and natural performances. Gorgeously photographed in Braidwood, New South Wales, Australia, the film avoids the usual "rites of passage" cliches and makes real the heartbreak of awakening sexuality and feeling alone. Set in 1962, Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) is a sensitive, scrawny 15-year old who is obsessed with his childhood friend, 16-year old Freya Olson (Leona Carmen).

He writes poetry and tries to emulate rock stars to win her over but his voice is always breaking when he tries to sing. Freya, orphaned as a baby and now something of a wild spirit, shares her secrets with Danny in their private place on the nearby rocky crags. Both teens feel isolated, Danny from the macho attitudes of his schoolmates and Freya because of the truth she senses about her mother.

Freya is increasingly attracted to Trevor (Ben Mendelsohn), a rugby player who is given to petty crime. Though the mood grows dark, Duigan uses humor to lighten things up when Danny attempts to hypnotize Freya into loving him, and when the boy tries mental telepathy to prevent Freya from kissing Trevor. Danny's loneliness is painfully evident when he tags along with Freya and Trevor on a date and has to endure the agony of watching them make love at a "haunted house". This house plays a significant part in Danny, Freya, and Trevor's relationship and in the film's dramatic climax. Duigan ties his story to the dark secret of the town whose discovery will change the lives of the characters forever and leave you reflecting on the pain of growing up.

This 1987 film written and directed by John Duigan and starring the ingenious Noah Taylor is a undiscovered gem. Set in 1952 in rural Australia the story centers around Danny Embling, a likeable and thoughtful boy outcast by his peers. He is in love with his best friend Freyia,and it is their turbulent relationship that is the heart of the story. When Freyia falls in love with Trevor, a hyper-active and troubled boy, the three struggle with their emerging feelings and the life altering decisions that they must make. Certainly, we've seen this all before but not like this. Never in my life have I seen such an honest portrayal of youth. The dialogue is not filled with ridiculous pop culture references or complex vocabulary but that is the charm. These people talk just like us. The story is never contrived and the acting is completely natural. Although all the performances are commendable,none so much as Noah Taylor's heartfelt portrayal of our bumbling hero. This is his first major film role and he floats through it naturally. His acting is subtle yet varied and he is one of the greatest undiscovered actors of our time. This is a wonderful film that everyone, art film buff to action fan,from 14 to 94 should see for the sweet story and natural performances especially from the wonderful Noah Taylor.

The talented John Duigan (perhaps best known for directing WIDE SARGASSO SEA (1993), based on the novel by Jean Rhys) wrote and directed this wonderful film about kids growing up in New South Wales, Australia, in 1962. Four years later, with the same boy in the lead, Duigan directed its sequel, FLIRTING (1991). The film is so honest, straightforward, and heart-rending, that it is a model of what an unpretentious film about real people should be. The film was made in the small town of Braidwood, which apart from its cinema looks like something from 1862 rather than 1962, so things clearly didn't change much in those days in the area they call the 'Tableland'. The film would not have worked if the two leads had not been so perfect. Seventeen year-old Loene Carmen is so fresh and real as the girl Freya Olson, but also so convincingly sad and tragic in the light of the events which ensue. The kids in this film just don't seem to be acting. We can almost believe that John Duigan sneaked into the little town with an invisible camera and recorded all of this really happening. The boy Danny is played by Noah Taylor. The honesty and integrity of his performance were the key to its success. He languishes with hopeless love as an onlooker to the tragic first romance of his childhood friend, Freya, who being older than him is 'out of his league' romantically. The pain of first love, especially unrequited first love, is intensely conveyed. There is also the implicit undercurrent that Freya may be his own half-sister, with neither of them realizing it, as there is a subplot about the dead mother of Freya, Sarah Amery, who died having her at the age of only 17, and the father may well have been Danny's own. But this is all the invisible 'grownup background' to the story of the kids, who are in the foreground of this tale. Ben Mendelsohn plays an older boy with a maniacal laugh who steals Freya's heart but who turns out to be mentally unbalanced, presumably with incipient schizophrenic. Things turn out badly. There are wonderful shots of the wild Australia, and the kids run around in the fields and on the hills with the abandon of a youth before everything became spoiled by cell phones, emails, and Facebook. Everyone in those days was outdoors all the time, not hunched over a computer. People actually looked at one another as they passed in the street, and were not peering into their Blackberrys or staring into space with a piece of metal stuck in their ear like a transplant. This film is an ode to real life, in a world which has forgotten what real life is. It is one of the masterpieces of the high tide of Australian cinema back in those days before the tide broke.

Australia seems to have an incredible knack for turning out beautiful films about real life situations fraught with meaning and mystery. This one is no exception. Like the Peter Weir classic _Picnic at Hanging Rock_, the landscape seems to come alive on the screen, and the sense of Australia's isolation does as well.

What I especially liked is that many of us (myself included) can empathize with Danny, but he's not perfect. The film really gets across the pain of falling for someone that you can never have. Trevor also embodies the kinds of guys that inexplicably attract strong-willed women like Freya. Despite the fact that one might not like his character, he's shown to have genuine feelings for Freya, and to be somewhat understanding of Danny. The major strength of the film is that the characters are fully fleshed out, with their own virtues and vices.

Instead of watching the cruddy teen movies that Hollywood churns out nowadays, give this one a try.

"The Year My Voice Broke" might be the best coming-of-age movie ever made in Australia. I'm unsure why it took me so long to watch it. I kind of expected it to be painful, and, you know, it was.

It does not have a happy ending. It's haunting and achingly beautiful. What you generally get from Australian movies that you don't get from Hollywood is truth. There's not a lot of sugar coating. And the characters feel believable as people who might actually exist, not broad archetypes we're all familiar with.

Take Danny, the main character, played by Noah Taylor, who played artistically inclined teenagers for at least another ten years (he was the young David Helfgott in "Shine"). If this movie were American, they'd probably make him a nerd, but Danny isn't a nerd. He's a poet, a musician, a singer. He's smarter than most of the people around him, he's socially awkward due to that depth of intelligence, but he's no "nerd". Like a real person, he is hard to categorise.

The same can be said for Freja, the girl he loves and has known his whole life. Even in the way Danny sees her, she's not your typical coming-of-age story's object of desire for the protagonist. In an American movie, she'd be like the exchange student in "American Pie", ie. Only ever glimpsed in terms of her sexuality. In "The Year My Voice Broke", she's so much more than that. She's too down to earth to be the elusive lust-object that girls like this typically are. Because Danny sees her as a person, and not as a lust object, we actually believe his love for her, and because Leone Carmen's performance is so good, we understand why he feels that way.

Nothing in "The Year My Voice Broke" is as it appears. The movie might evoke some standard plot devices, such as a love-triangle, but it all feels lived in and real. This is what makes it one of the best coming-of-age stories ever made.