My best guess for how I ever learned about this film is that it was advertised as I prepared to see another. Based on the subject, I'm not surprised it hasn't been talked about much in the U.S., despite financial success within its home country. Still, stories about singers tend to draw me in, so I chose it from my list.
Based on a play based very loosely on a true story, it takes place in 1968, starting at an Aboriginal Australian reserve. Three adult sisters -- in descending order of age, Gail (Deborah Mailman), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and Julie (Jessica Mauboy) -- gain the attention of talent scout Dave (Chris O'Dowd), probably the first White person to recognize their merit as singers. He gets them on a tour -- along with their semi-estranged cousin, Kay (Shari Sebbens) -- performing soul classics for U.S. troops in Vietnam. Their most immediate concern, of course, is that the army can't fully guarantee safety.
The war is hardly their only source of strife. From his entrance, we see that Dave is unreliable, largely thanks to drunkenness. Cynthia has to pull herself together after her fiance (whose ring inspires the group name) jilts her. Gail is harsh, bossy, and slow to accept that she's not the best choice for a lead singer. She wants Julie, a young mother, to stay home and resents Kay for losing touch with her origins.
More on that last point: The period was no kinder to Aboriginals than to African Americans. The former faced not only rampant open racism but the threat of the government abducting their mixed-race children from the reserves and raising them in the mainstream Australian culture. Gail undoubtedly feels some guilt for failing to save Kay from that, but she objects whether Kay acts completely White or starts to reembrace her Blackness by showing interest in a Black soldier.
Er, yes, he's the American kind of "Black." This ties in with the other way race matters to the story: The sisters like to sing country and western, but Dave insists that soul will go over far better coming from women who look like them. Much as I detest such profiling, I can't complain about the results this time; it's more music to my ears. Dave might be right about the genre being more take-charge in the face of loss.
I'm not particularly fond of any of the romantic arcs going on. Kay's is shallow and unlikely to last; I can't even find his name again with confidence. Cynthia's is realistic enough but messy. And then there's Gail and Dave. I can hardly imagine how that happened after all their rocky interactions. FWIW, the real Sapphires never had a Dave counterpart, so the love is completely made up. As are a lot of other things, judging from the IMDb goofs page, so don't expect education on anything besides the Stolen Generations.
The humor? Adequate for comic relief. Nothing really innovative; it's mainly just a bunch of little moments adding up, like outsiders' difficulty pronouncing the reserve name and the clumsiness of Kay's boyfriend. Dave gets the most tickling lines.
For me, TS works best as a peek at individuals from a world that is at once very different and very familiar. They go through a lot of things I never will, but they seem no less human for that. And even at its weakest, it doesn't fail to entertain.
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