High Tide

An Australian soap opera reuniting the director (Gillian Armstrong) and lead actress (Judy Davis) of My Brilliant Career eight years later. This time they’re teamed in a somewhat protracted tale of a backup singer (Davis), temporarily stranded in a trailer park in a coastal fishing town, who accidentally encounters the daughter she abandoned many years ago (Claudia Karvan), now living with her grandmother (Jan Adele). While the acting is uniformly competent and Davis is especially good, Laura Jones’s screenplay never gets beyond the obvious and familiar. (Davis’s part was originally written for a man, and while Davis makes the character suggestively travel scarred, she can’t really transcend a part that seems somewhat hackneyed for either sex.) The results are watchable enough, though not nearly as good as Housekeeping (1988). (JR)

This entry was posted in Featured Texts. Bookmark the permalink.