Uncut. Wayne Blair’s Sapphires is another testament to the effectiveness of the artistic and analytical approach of modern directors to the past. Especially when it comes to Australia, a country where almost half a century ago indigenous people were considered almost slaves, the relevance of the problems of ethnic minorities can not be disputed. In the 60s of the last century, the fate of Australian aborigines changed dramatically - during the 1967 federal referendum on changing the national constitution, they received a legal justification for their civil rights. The more interesting thing is that the events of the picture unfold a year after that.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that the film was based on the real story of the mother of one of the screenwriters Tony Briggs, at the output grew into a musical collective of 4 people by the number of sisters. Three of them, Cynthia, Gale and Julie, initially could only dream about even modest fame, living among a rural community of similarly illiterate “natives”, disconnected from the noisy world. Their cousin Kay, at one time forcibly separated from the community, was fortunate enough to become a full-fledged part of Melbourne’s civilization. When Dave Lovelace, an Irish soul musician, enters the field of view of girls dreaming of performing in Vietnam, they literally grab him like a straw. At first, the man refuses to take country singers with him, motivating this by divergence of views on music, but in the end he gives up and even finds a place in the team for Kay, who managed to become a stranger.
Wayne Blair in his film creates a living mixture of historical, political and cultural heritage of the past, brightly colored with benign humor with a small share of quite obvious pathos. Far from limiting himself solely to artificial reproductions of the past, he uses archival footage as a historical context, with the military presence in Vietnam described in noticeably muted tones, giving critics reason to doubt the film's absolute publicity. It is difficult to agree with this, given the original plan of the director to show exactly the turbulent social climate of the 1960s through a powerful combination of comedy and characters, where historical didactics would inevitably fade into the background.
From a human point of view, Sapphires only repeat the axiom that not every uniqueness needs to be cut. When you hear from the mouths of the world’s uncouth Bushmen that their trio is “the best girl group in the world”, while the potential impresario is more like a drunken loser, you have persistent doubts about the feasibility of their experiment. At the same time, the sisters’ obsession with music and dreaming of Vietnam is genuinely sincere, as is the hidden confrontation between the rural community in which they grew up. Heroes constantly play on the contradictions and feelings of each other, bringing matters to open confrontation, in order to immerse themselves with renewed vigor in joint work that gives all the best results.
Wayne Blair’s socially significant film has a good set of artistic means. The combination of “dark and white” elements always gives unexpected results, and here each image is literally disassembled into its components. Gale was the most successful at this, initially demonstrating a misunderstanding in working together with a European man and, ultimately, most embodied the important problem of adapting to a foreign culture that had a powerful impact on the formation of personal experience. Art and humanism once again help humanity in the fight against socio-political disease, be it war or inequality, confirming its fundamental mission.