2023 Directed by Bill Mousoulis
A young woman, Emma studying at university and living at home with her mother and brother in the Adelaide suburbs, falls in love with a cafe waiter Nick, who lives and works in the town of Stirling in the Adelaide Hills. Entranced by the man and the town, she begins to feel a sense of excitement and vitality in her life.
Australia
Australia
AFF23 #5
Dances between the enchanting highs of first love and the dull specifics of the everyday in the way only a no-budget homage to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg set in the Adelaide Hills and made by Australia's foremost DIY maverick ever could. Mousoulis captures the fantasyland that is Stirling in all its autumnal allure, with equal devotion given to the all-consuming excitement of budding romance and the logistics of navigating Adelaide Metro to get to your volunteer job and back every day (that first Princes Highway tunnel poetically rendered as the gateway to another world).
It's absurd, but Emma's Stirling is much the same as my own; a place that didn't seem real the first time, a place tiedโฆ
I admit to total and unashamed bias, but I found this delightful from front to back. Despite its avowed debt to Demy, this is like nothing I have ever seen before, outdoing Godard's 'neorealist musical' in both sincerity and conviction with a fraction of the resources.
In many ways, My Darling in Stirling is a continuation of Bill Mousoulis' career-long fascination with all that is beautiful and strange in the mundane and the everyday. But in this fascination's combining with his wonderful and totally destabilising conceit of the musical constructed out of royalty-free backing tracks and sung-spoken banalities, he reaches a hypnotic apotheosis of his overall project.
Like the best visits to the film's namesakes (whether it be a darlingโฆ
My love of this film is heavily linked to everything it manages to achieve that so many other films with more money and resources fail dismally at.ย
So many films have striven for the magic of Jacques Demy and fallen flat on their asses. Mousoulis succeeds because he understands not only the melancholy aspect to Demy but also the mundane.ย
It can be a difficult thing for the ear to adjust to mundane vernacular being represented in music, whether it be in a Michel Legrand ditty or an opera recitativo. Once you embrace it, of course, itโs dazzling.ย
Thereโs a great amount of wonderful humour that comes with this, too. Thereโs definitely a beautiful knowing sense that comes with havingโฆ
What can i say,, no one could sing, she had an anne frank photo on her wall, every scene faded to black, the music is royalty free, everyone has this thousand yard stare,,, this and a joint would go sooo hard.
The Room, Birdemic, Cats, Battlefield Earth. My Darling In Sterling deserves to stand among these so bad they're good masterpieces. Everything about this film is bonkers, completely sung by people that can't sing but in a huge twist, the actors are actually lip syncing to OTHER VOICE ACTORS! So they actually hired people specifically to sing and not act, who can't even sing.
Besides being sung horribly, the music is completely comprised of free use music off the internet, and some songs are so bonkers inappropriate, such as a sweet romantic date set to a hard as fuck rock song complete with shredding guitar solos.
The plot is bare bones and anything of interest happens off screen. Yep, it's aโฆ
Terrible on all fronts. Dead-eyed actors (with the exception of Henry Cooper), horrible writing where major plot points happen off camera, actually unoriginal royalty free stock music. To top it all off, (bad) singers were cast for the actors to lip sync along to! This film made me understand why sometimes you need a bag of rotten tomatoes.
