Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(10/03/07)

"Love...that word neither of us had used because we're both too cool for that."

It's 1965 -- Lyndon B. Johnson is surging U. S. troops into Vietnam. The Beatles are invading New York. In Uganda, a charismatic military officer named Idi Amin is gaining influence. At St. Albans boarding school in rural Australia, the boys' top poster pick is the surf-drenched heroine of the first James Bond film, whom they refer to as "Arsula Undress."

Danny is St. Albans' whipping boy. Short, sarcastic, and unkempt, he reads Sartre and wholeheartedly agrees with him that hell is other people. There are the masters who cane him, the classmates who bully him and steal his letters. There's no escape. He couldn't stand it except for one thing: he's met a girl.

Across the lake from St. Albans lies paradise: Cirencester Ladies' College. The new girl at Cirencester, Thandiwe, is a black from Uganda whose father is a visiting lecturer at Canberra , which makes her as much of an outcast as Danny. Danny impresses Thandiwe at a rugby football match when he notes to her friends that he's only interested in the game from an anthropological viewpoint, as a form of mating ritual. "That's why you're here, isn't it?" he asks them.

At a debate about the superiority of intellectual pursuits, they each mock the preoccupations of their fellow students by ironically championing them. Danny passionately defends football and Thandiwe recites scandalous rock-and-roll lyrics: "I just wanna make love to you."

Right from the start, Danny and Thandiwe must conduct their flirtation underground as the ruling classes reject them from conventional romantic avenues. Their struggle to get together is witnessed, aided, and abetted by their classmates, who have a soft spot for romance as well as for evading authority. The film well depicts the students' world as akin to the solidarity of a wartime resistance movement or of prisoners hatching escape plots.

Winner of four Australian Academy Awards including Best Picture, Flirting is a wry, unsentimental take on young love directed by John Duigan, who also helmed the delicious soft core nudes-in-nature biopic Sirens. This is the sequel to Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke, though it's not necessary to have seen that one first.

Flirting never condescends to its youthful protagonists, presenting them as serious, defiant, and perceptive, more so than many of the adult authority figures meting out discipline, who seem to have had all the audacity knocked out of them and to exist by rote. Expert in the dynamics of oppression, Danny observes: "People like to have someone to look down on. Makes them feel better about themselves."

Excellent work is done by a cast featuring several notable actors early in their careers: Noah Taylor as Danny, Thandie Newton as Thandiwe, and Nicole Kidman as the girls school's strict prefect Nicola, who vicariously enjoys Thandiwe's romance even as she's duty bound to prevent it. Nicola has her own secret involving feeling "so shivery delicious all over." Also look for Naomi Watts in a small role.

There's plenty of satirical humor and witty observation, especially relating to music and approved adolescent mating rituals. An incongruously sensual scene occurs at a girls' dance class set to pounding Jungle-Music-style jazz. "Sultry! Smolder!" coaches the teacher, as Thandiwe dances with Nicola. Before the big inter-school formal, the girls are depicted putting on their warpaint to the same wailing, pulsating strains and emerge looking about ten years more mature than the boys. The two schools collaborate on a bizarre class musical tastefully based on the rape of Persephone, with the actors' faces painted half-black, half-white.

A great comic bit has Danny and Thandiwe trapped in the boy's washroom as the fourth-formers troop in for their showers. Flirting is quite blasé about full-frontal male nudity, though the girls get to keep their underwear on.

Plot-wise, the film goes where you expect -- the wee-hours rows across the lake, the misunderstanding, the hopeless physical combat against a far greater foe, the balcony climbing -- but not how you expect. Everything flows naturally and resonates with the tropes of classic romantic drama, rather than plagiarizing them. Danny and Thandiwe are in the grip of something much older and larger than themselves. Just as Thandiwe and her father are in the grip of political turmoil beyond their control, turmoil that incites the lovers to a now-or-never desperation.

Flirting's take on sex is generous and positive, not tragic and punitive. His best friend at school Gilbert advises Danny before his midnight date: "Remember her needs as well as yours. In the long run, they're more important. If you can give her pleasure, she'll be back for more."

The lovers' first sex is fully-clothed, tentative, and tender. Thandiwe asks, "Do you mind if we just kiss and touch a bit?" It's followed by skipping stones in the lake. Danny's stones seem to skip forever, as if they could fly.

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