KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: 3/5
"I've always been told I was born before my time," Broadhurst remarks early on in this documentary about her life and death. "But surely to God the times can just catch up."
It's not her voice, in fact, but that of Farr, an actress who impersonates her throughout the film, directed by Australian veteran Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, High Tide).
Broadhurst was a larger-than-life figure from the Queensland backblocks who became a cabaret dancer in Shanghai in the 1920s and an English socialite before returning to her homeland pretending to be an upper-crust immigrant. In Sydney she parlayed her entrepreneurial and design talents into screen-printed wallpapers that are now design classics until her (still unsolved) 1977 murder.
Armstrong, a fine film-maker, is no stranger to documentary but this is hampered by a busy, cluttered style. Particularly in the early stages, it jumps from one talking head to another and the provenance of the "quotes" from its subject are irritatingly unclear.
"Everybody thought they knew who killed me," is obviously the product of a film-maker's fancy but many lines are not and it is equally hard to tell which file footage is generic and which specific.
Most alarmingly, Armstrong animates some sequences with the sliding cutout style Terry Gilliam used in early Monty Python, complete with captions full of groan-inducing puns. The intention is presumably to match Broadhurst's devil-may-care style but it trivialises and distracts. Lurking behind the artifice is a genuinely interesting story about one of those fascinating women who litter Australasian history and whose lives are often forgotten. It emerges in spite of the film-maker, but is still worth hearing.
Cast: Judi Farr, Felicity Price, Hanna Garbo, Robert Lloyd-Lewis, Phyllis Nicholson, Marno Parsons, Maggie Tabberer, Akira Isogawa.
Director: Gillian Armstrong
Running time: 82 minutes
Rating: PG
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: A busy, cluttered style spoils an otherwise interesting documentary about the flamboyant (and mysteriously murdered) Australian design diva Florence Broadhurst.
