Singing soul sisters’ story sweetly simple
Go into The Sapphires expecting little more than a Dreamgirls Down Under and you’ll come out humming “Soul Man” and feeling pretty good about the experience.
Based on a true story of an all-girl aboriginal Australian group made of sisters and a cousin who find fleeting fame and love on the run while singing soul classics for American soldiers in Vietnam in 1968, sweetly simple Sapphires is hardly a cinematic diamond mine. But this Commitments- style mashup of music and melodrama manages to entertain without demanding too much of its audience.
Bridesmaids’ Chris O’Dowd, as likeably talented a comic actor as anybody working today, brings an effortless charm to the role of Dave Lovelace, a down-and-out Irishman who is the acerbic, drunken host of a tavern talent show in a dusty Outback burg.
It’s his good fortune to discover singing sisters Gail (Deborah Mailman, the best actress of the bunch), cutie Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) and songbird Julie ( Australian Idol run- ner-up Jessica Mauboy). If only he can persuade them to swap their fondness for country twang for Motown soul.
Montages and musical sequences help pick up the slack and ensure toes tap throughout, and there’s a sweetness and naïveté to their earnest performances, where well-clad booties are shaken in the most Grated fashion. But you can’t help but fall a little in love with these scrappy young women, who stubbornly refuse to let anybody tell them what to do.
The story takes an interesting twist with the addition of cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) to the group. She’s a light- skinned gal who’s been passing for white since she was scooped up by government authorities to be raised in the city and away from her ancestral lands, part of a government plan of forced assimilation and eradication of aboriginal culture. She and Gail butt heads — and for good reason — but that storyline fades in another chorus of “Land of a Thousand Dances.”
Racial tensions play a substantial role in director Wayne Blair’s adaptation of Tony Briggs’ stage play (Briggs’ mother was an original Sapphire) with the women facing endless prejudices. Yet they find a place with the brothers on the road from Saigon — and romance too.
Afilm-fest favourite ( The Sapphires screened at TIFF in September 2012 after a Cannes premiere), the uncomplicated feel of the game girlsand-music story pretty much ruled the Australian box office last year.
Although O’Dowd is the dominate force when there’s no snappy musical numbers to distract, some kudos should go to the female cast, a quartet of varying onscreen competency. Tapsell is endearing as the firecracker kid who subs moxie for brain power. Mauboy has the pipes and is the classic beauty who gets the big play on movie posters, but generously proportioned Mailman is the real star here, an actress of considerable talent. And unlike in Hollywood where only the size zero gets the hero, she finds love as well.