MOVIE REVIEW : Funny ‘Flirting’ Deepens Into Social Commentary

John Duigan’s bittersweet, luminous “Flirting” (at the Westside Pavilion and the Beverly Center) is set in rural Australia, where two Victorian red-brick fortresses peer at each other across a lake. On the one side is St. Albans, a posh prep school for boys, and on the other is the Cirencester Ladies’ College. Although the time is the mid-’60s, it might as well be the 19th Century. Corporal punishment is the order of the day at St. Albans, and encounters between the boys and girls of the two schools are policed vigorously.

Into this privileged, lily-white and unabashedly bigoted atmosphere arrives a beautiful Ugandan, Thandiwe Adjewa (Thandie Newton), who luckily is as brilliant as she is beautiful. Her hauteur is not only forgivable but essential to her survival, for she immediately realizes that it will take all her worldliness, sophistication and quick wit to put down the fledgling racists who threaten to engulf her. She is able to defend herself with outrageous behavior that can take her to the brink--but not quite over the edge--that has the added effect of first shocking and then impressing the other girls.

As strong and courageous as she is, Thandiwe--that’s pronounced Tandy-Way--feels understandably lonely and isolated beneath her bravura surface and is therefore eager to connect with a fellow outsider at St. Albans. He’s Danny Embling (Noah Taylor), a skinny kid who looks like a young Bob Dylan or Oscar Levant and has a smart mouth. The sharp sensibilities of Noah and Thandiwe throw into bold relief the utter mindlessness and stultifying conformity of the academic world in which they are trapped.

“Flirting” starts out as a prankish, satirical, often hilarious preppy comedy and deepens into a serious story of first love overshadowed both by rigid social mores and reports of Idi Amin’s terrible rise to power in Uganda. It is the second installment in Duigan’s coming-of-age trilogy, which began with “The Year My Voice Broke”--and in which the talented Taylor made his film debut as Danny.

One of the most gifted Australian filmmakers--but still one of the least familiar to American audiences--Duigan is a compelling storyteller of exceptional breadth and depth. He understands his young people from within so that they move you and involve you as did their counterparts in “Rebel Without a Cause.” What’s more, Duigan is as visual as he is literate; there’s a grace and scope to “The Year My Voice Broke” and “Flirting” that for all their well-turned dialogue connects them more to American movies than to the talky tradition of the British cinema.

Newton and Taylor are enormously appealing and believable, and they are supported by an equally talented cast that includes Nicole Kidman, who has the crucial role of a proud young woman, the natural leader of the girls, too smart and imaginative to accept convention and tradition blindly but not about to buck them either. It is a measure of the high aspirations of “Flirting” (Times-rated Mature for adult situations, language) that it doesn’t treat her as a prom-queen bitch but as a reminder that even those who fit in and prevail can become bored and dissatisfied with a smug society.

‘Flirting’

Noah Taylor: Danny Embling

Thandie Newton: Thandiwe Adjewa

Nicole Kidman: Nicola Radcliffe

A Samuel Goldwyn Co. release of a Kennedy Miller production. Writer-director John Duigan. Producers George Miller, Doug Mitchell, Terry Hayes. Cinematographer Geoff Burton. Editor Robert Gibson. Music supervisor Christine Woodruff. Production design Roger Ford. Art director Laurie Faen. Set decorators Kerrie Brown, Glen Johnson. Sound Ross Linton. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for adult situations, language).