Pale Imitations

“If this is supposed to be a chick flick I don’t get it,” my regular companion exclaimed as we were leaving Australia (the movie). She was right. Australia is anything but a film about teenage fantasies, even if this was suggested by the early publicity. Director Baz Luhrmann has been only too willing to provide a filmography of influences for the talk shows—Gone with the Wind, The Overlanders and Red River. I was also able to spot homages to Sergio Leone—eyes peering out of the shadow cast by a cowboy hat of course—Crocodile Dundee, and just about any range war western you like to name.

Then there is Luhrmann’s use of devices from the women’s melodrama (the reason for the early chick-flick publicity). Alarmed by reports that her husband is philandering on his enormous cattle station in northern Australia, Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England just in time to find that he has been murdered, supposedly by King George (David Gulpilil) a mysterious Aborigine who has fled…