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By Neil Jillett
It may be a parochial point to make
about a “foreign” film, but it is impossible
to ignore. In the central role of the New Zealand drama
Bread and Roses, the Melbourne actror Genevieve Picot
gives probably the finest screen performance ever by
an Australian woman. She has been provided with a great
story and a fine script, and she makes the most of them.
Bread
and Roses is a two-part tele-drama that is deservedly
being screened as a 196-minute feature. Don’t
be put off by the length; this film never drags. It
is directed
and co-written by Gaylene Preston, although the main
writing credit goes to Graeme Tetley. He and Preston
collaborated on the sprightly generation-gap comedy
Ruby and Rata, which inexplicably did not get a commercial
release here after its success at the 1991 Melbourne
Film Festival.
Their new film is based on the autobiography
of Sonja
Davies, feminist, socialist, pacifist, trade unionist,
politician, justice of the peace, anti-nuclear campaigner,
marriage celebrant, farmer, nurse, wife, mother and
general stirrer. Bread and Roses does not tell her
whole story
(she is still alive) but concentrates on events between
1942, when she made a short, disastrous marriage at
the age of 17, to her first move, 40 years late, into
the
limelight of national fame and notoriety.
The only things
seriously wrong with Bread and Roses are its opening
and closing minutes. The first few
scenes are clogged with didactic, overloaded dialogue.
The last
scenes, though theoretically well-chosen to close
the film on a high note, are handled with a disconcerting
abruptness. But my complaint about this ending is
partly
a tribute to Preston and her colleagues. They had
presented most of the drama with such entertaining intelligence
that I wanted more of it.
The chief beauty of the
script is the naturalness with which it links political
events and everyday
domestic
reality. These events are not always of much public
significance, but they are always stamped with
interest because of
Sonja Davies’ stubborn enthusiasm.
But Sonja was
far more than a woman with a soapbox. She was born
out of wedlock and had her own first child
while
she was single. This double whammy of “illegitimacy” led
to a fascinating love-hate relationship with her mother
(played with sulky yet touching primness by Donna Akersten).
Sonja contracted tuberculosis while she was a nurse,
and her battle against the disease, which nearly killed
her, is a big part of the drama. Her second marriage,
to Charlie (Mick Rose), was happy – and provides
more drama. Charlie’s exasperated geniality,
his acceptance of the role of second fiddle in their
family,
gives Bread and Roses a firmly comic underpinning.
Picot
(Sonja) is almost as convincing as a 17-year-old, and
thoroughly convincing at all other ages. The script
gives her plenty of opportunities to show her range – Sonja
coughing blood, enduring a long labour, smugly or proudly
standing up for her beliefs, muddling through a driving
lesson, getting an ironic pleasure from being an efficient
housewife, berating men for their blindness. Picot
gives us the whole woman, self-righteous and arrogant
as well
as altruistic and compassionate. There is a fierce
glow to Picot’s performance that never lets us
seriously question the truth of the life she is recreating
or the
integrity of the woman who lived it.
It is a mark of
Picot’s professionalism that, unlike
some New Zealand members of the cast, she gets the
Kiwi accent of the times right. And, apart from a few
lapses,
the film looks unostentatiously in period, thanks largely
to Rick Kofoed’s design and Allen Guilford’s
photography.
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