HOME CINEMAMay 2020 | Sight&Sound | 91Lost and Found
By Graham Fuller
After High Tide (1987) was revived at the 2017
Melbourne film festival – as it was at 2019’s
Sydney festival – an audience member recounted
during the Q&A with director Gillian Armstrong
and actor Claudia Karvan that she and a
childhood friend had been so obsessed with the
movie they watched their VHS copy “once a week
for many years”. Though apparently thrice-issued- judging by the different box covers depicting
its star Judy Davis – High Tide is now hard to
find on tape and, owing to rights problems,
is still unreleased on DVD or Blu-ray. Nor is it
being streamed. The absence is glaring given its
status as a post-Australian New Wave classic.
High Tide was Armstrong’s fourth feature
following My Brilliant Career (1979) – the first
fiction film directed by an Australian woman
for 46 years – Starstruck (1982) and Mrs. Soffel
(1984). Returning to Melbourne after making
Mrs. Soffel for MGM in North America, Armstrong
“met for weeks” with producer Sandra Levy
and screenwriter Laura Jones “trying to come
up with an idea for the greatest small story ever
made”. Averse to being pigeonholed as makers
of films about women, they conceived a drama
about a male surfer-drifter who meets his long-
lost daughter – an idea prompted by ongoing
adoption legislation reforms that were enabling
children and birth-parents to reconnect.
The film was five weeks from preproduction
when, in June 1985, Armstrong was disconcerted
by seeing Ian Pringle’s Wrong World, another story
of an alienated male drifter, at the Melbourne film
festival. That night, her partner, documentary
editor John Pleffer, suggested she make High
Tide a woman’s story after all. Jones retooled the
script for Davis, who opted for the protagonist
Lillie to be middle-class. Davis’s experience
at 18, singing with a band on an Asian tour
that left her stranded in Taipei, influenced the
decision to make Lillie a backup singer sacked
by a low-rent Elvis impersonator (Frankie J.
Holden) who plays working-class social clubs.
Stuck in Eden, a depressed New South Wales
fishing port, since she can’t pay for her car to
be fixed, Lillie rents a caravan and drowns her
sorrows in whisky. She’s found drunkenly
singing Bob Dylan’s ‘Dark Eyes’ on the Mermaid
Caravan Park’s washroom floor by 13-year-
old neighbour Ally (Karvan), who escorts her
home. Inspired by Dylan’s encounter with a
beautiful but haggard call-girl in the corridor
of a Manhattan hotel, the song augurs a grim
future for Lillie: to meet the garage bill she
works as a stripper – loathing the punters –
and considers offering the mechanic sex.
Ally lives with her restrictive paternal
grandmother Bet (veteran entertainer Jan
Adele), who’s horrified when she runs into
Lillie – her despised daughter-in-law and Ally’s
mother. The backstory is that Lillie, wildly in
love with her husband and devastated by his
death, had abandoned her baby to Bet before
taking to the road and the bottle. Bet had brought
Ally to Eden and told her she was an orphan;
Lillie hadn’t guessed Ally was her daughter. As
her love for her reawakens – she gazes at the
adolescent’s ankles as she secretly shaves her legs
in a toilet stall – tense battles for the girl ensue:
one between Lillie and Bet, selfish but a solidbreadwinner; the other, much fiercer, between
Lillie’s maternal instinct and her conscience. She
fears she’s incapable of responsible motherhood.
Cinematographer Russell Boyd’s soul-baring
close-ups of Lillie and Ally are contrasted with
compositions in which their difficulties in
‘seeing’ each other are literalised by decorative
objects that obscure their sightlines.
Mother and daughter’s natural affinity is coded
in aquatic images connoting the inseparability
of the sea (the unconscious) and fish (‘live’
material from the psychic depths). Lillie first
appears wearing a glittery fish costume on stage,
Ally – between girlhood and womanhood – lying
half-submerged in a rock pool. When they meet
in the Mermaid washroom Ally is wet from a
shower and Lillie calls her “fish-feet”. The talks
that bring them close occur near the shore and in
a fish restaurant. Bet, who handles dead fish in a
cannery, wants Ally to get rid of the surfboard that
connects her to the sea and her dead surfer dad.
High Tide helped pave the way for more
Australian women to get films made in the
1990s. Armstrong continues to campaign for
women filmmakers in the fallow current era,
though she resents the gender distinction and
rails against the ‘strong woman’ archetype
that denies female characters psychological
complexity. High Tide was revelatory in its
focus on the multidimensional Lillie (and
Bet is equally complicated). Shrewd and self-
willed, she abjures conventional femininity
and prescriptive roles: she dumps her Eden
fisherman boyfriend (Colin Friels) because he
envisions them moving in together and running
a small business. But her cynicism is a shell that
cracks, revealing a woman – a self-confessed
coward – blocked by trauma and guilt but
struggling, at last, to embrace her true nature.
Indelibly portrayed by Davis, Lillie is easier for
most viewers to identify with than a heroine
artificially constructed to convey strength.Gillian Armstrong’s fourth
feature is a revelatory portrayal
of complex, flawed women,
and an Australian classicThe wizard of Oz: Judy Davis in High Tide (1987)Indelibly portrayed by Judy
Davis, Lillie is easier for most
viewers to identify with than
an artificial strong heroine
HIGH TIDE
‘Without a trace of
schlock or schmaltz,
Armstrong depicts the
viewpoints of three
women with great
skill, aided in no small
way by Laura Jones’s
admirable script. A
distinctive sense of
place, a generous
sense of humour, and
three remarkable performances combine
to produce a movie with an undertow of
astonishing emotional power.’
Mark Sanderson ‘Time Out’WHAT THE PAPERS SAID
OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
‘W
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