saw Starstruck (11 August 2017 i.e. five years ago)

So I went to see Starstruck with my mother and one of my umpteen sisters, the oldest one, at ACMI. 1982 was actually not a very good year for me (what years I wonder would I typify as very good years?) but it was at least the year Starstruck came out. I am not sure what I made of it at the time but all evidence points to me actually having seen it (apart from anything else I loved the Swingers and the Swingers are all over it). The screening was attended by Gillian Armstrong and David Elphick who participated in a Q&A at the end of the film which now, 16 hours later in my memory is just woman after woman saying ‘I saw Starstruck when I was 12, and it made me decide I would dedicate my life to the arts’ etc, etc. A number of things stood out for me re: Starstruck, probably on 4^th or 5^th viewing. One is that everyone remembers Jo Kennedy being ‘topless’ on the tightrope as a stunt to get noticed by the media, except of course she just has a ‘topless’ top on. Fine. But who remembers that she is, in fact, topless about ten minutes into the film? Extraordinary. And also the amount of tobacco and pot smoking (partix the putatively 14-year-old Angus) is remarkable really.

Best bits = the music actually, which I gather has been remastered (they said ‘remixed’ but I doubt that, tbh) and some of the random dialogue/jokes, none of which I can presently remember. Another thing that really impressed me was the randomness of the setting. Yeah, the main characters all live in a pub under the harbor bridge – of course they do – and that’s a hoot (did Strictly Ballroom harness this notion a few years later or am I projecting) and (as Gillian Armstrong mentioned herself) the bridge appears again and again as an image in the film – on the walls of the pub, for instance. But there are no sweeping helicopter establishing shots or any shit like that, which is fabulous. Ditto the Opera house, which is a key location, but once again no dazzling panoramas. It’s just not that kind of film. Or rather, it is the kind of film it is, all too rare, and brilliant because of it.

In a manner of speaking the film came out of Go-Set (Steven Maclean the scriptwriter, and David Elphick, and Molly Meldrum who had impact on the movie and for that matter is partially the inspiration for a character, all worked there). I remember Pip Proud was very upset about the way that David Elphick responded to him when he tried to (or did?) meet the Small Faces and the Who in I guess 68. I am about ready to forgive him for that though.

In the hours after, I had the weird experience of talking to someone who knew someone who met Jo Kennedy, got along with her and then found out she had been the main character in Starstruck and thereafter could not even talk to her she was so, ok it’s obvious, starstruck. Then shortly after that someone who briefly knew Ross Donovan (Angus). What a world.