The Sapphires

Saw The Sapphires (thanks, Basil!) It was a film about a quartet of aboriginal women who formed a band to entertain the American troops in Vietnam. The film follows the different women through the chaos of the Vietnam war and through the racism they faced along the way. We open, for example, on one of their childhood concerts getting broken up by feds in suits, coming to take the children off to re-education schools. There's also a ton of time given over to a white guy who is their band manager. He is shown in the middle of the movie poster, surrounded by his adoring backup singers actual band.

The film covers interesting subject matter, but never really rises to it. It sort of felt like a Lifetime movie to me or something. There's moments of tension and drama, but they're all sort of flat. They're serviceable but not great. And it's not a bad movie at all, just one that might be, say, shown in a classroom and then never thought about again.

The film is very focused on these four women. Their story brings us into contact with some elements of Australian race relations and into the wider political perspective of America's doings in Vietnam, but we spend way more footage on the drinking problem of one of them, or on the romances of one of the others. The racial and political stuff feels perfunctory, as thought they had to get it out of the way to tell the story. Man, that's like all that I care about!

So not a bad movie, but Lifetime-film-tier. Maybe worth a look if you want an introduction to Australia's treatment of their natives, although I suspect there's probably something better out there for that.