Second in John Duigan's promised trilogy on coming-of-age in the Sixties. The mood is set this time not by Vaughan Williams's "Lark Ascending" but by the little pastoral interlude in Vaughan Williams's "Wasps Overture." The hero, first met in The Year My Voice Broke, is now away at a militaristic prep school (uniforms, canings, athletic rites of passage), where he catches the eye of an exotic Ugandan enrolled in the girls' school across the lake. There is no real orignality or insight, and there is a full cartload of triteness (the wimp gaining respect by taking a beating and bouncing back for more), but the budding romance between two pretentious self-styled misfits (she is habitually "disappointed" in people; he is reading the French existentialists) engages your sympathy and, as it enters a darker stretch toward the end, amply rewards that sympathy. You want the best for the pair. You even want a sequel for them. With Noah Taylor, Thandie Newton, and Nicole Kidman. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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