Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Kerry’s mother washing Kerry’s hair over the kitchen sink and giving advice on Kerry’s boyfriend Jack. The two women are seen in close-up as they discuss Jack, men in general and then Kerry’s violent father. As if in flashback the camera pans across the set, 70s disco music fades in and the figure of Kerry’s father, resplendent in a cream suit, dances into the now darkened kitchen. The music fades, he leaves, the lights come up and the mother’s advice continues.

Educational value points

• This clip powerfully depicts the ‘tough love’ with which Kerry’s mother (Jacqy Phillips) attempts, from a position of bitter experience, to advise and instruct her lovesick adolescent daughter. The mother’s frustration is expressed both physically (she pushes Kerry to emphasise a point) and verbally (‘make an effort’ and ‘you won’t try’). There is softness, though, in the way she covers her daughter’s head with a towel, veil-like, and strokes her.

• The clip is from a television drama but owes much to the theatre in its set design and choreography. The camera does not move around the action but films it from the perspective of a theatre audience. The kitchen sink appears not to be against a kitchen wall but open to the audience. Lighting conventions used in theatrical productions such as fades and spotlights are employed and the dance sequence is directed and filmed as though for a theatre audience.

• Lighting changes heighten the theatricality and surreal nature of the scene. When Kerry’s father makes his entrance, descending in a warm red spotlight from the discothèque, the kitchen set fades to dark and he dominates the scene. As the focus reverts to the mother and daughter the father is shown as a shadowy figure behind them, and mother and daughter are lit with a warm red glow. When the father’s apparition departs, the scene returns to the original more realistic lighting.

• The lesson that looks are not everything in a relationship has been lost on Kerry’s mother who repeatedly admonishes her daughter to spend more time on her appearance. It is no surprise then that when she imagines Kerry’s father dancing she focuses on his looks ('he was that well groomed’), even while recalling the reality of his cruelty and domestic violence.

• Jacqy Phillips successfully portrays the complexity of the mother’s character, at once bitter, frustrated and caring. Phillips’s ability to exhibit a wide range of emotions is a hallmark of her career and is evident as she chides, cajoles and attacks her daughter, then remembers with longing and dread her own romance. Phillips graduated from Flinders Drama Centre in South Australia in 1977 and has spent most of her acting life in theatre, with forays into radio productions and film.