Flirting
STILL UNDER MAJOR CONSTRUCTION!
Hi and welcome to Jenny’s new quotes page for the Australian film “Flirting.” The film stars Noah Taylor, Thandie Newton, and Nicole Kidman. Yes, its another one of those coming-of-age movies that I love (if you’ve seen some of my other sites you know what I mean). “Flirting” is actually a sequel to John Duigan’s “The Year My Voice Broke.” Personally, I found “Flirting” to be much more savvy and funny than John Duigan’s first attempt at depicting anti-hero Danny Embling. My advice, see both and decide for yourself.
Danny: (voice over) I remember the smells most. Stale lockers with fruit cakes rotting into the wood, crusty shoe polish, damp towels, quick ink for fountain pens, disinfectant on the floors of the shower block. Fresh chalk, moldy oranges blue with mildew. And on a rainy day, a deep, rank, wild smell of discarded football mits. 
And I remember the pain, but, only vaguely. I had a thick hide by then. They sent me to boarding school so I wouldn’t become a delinquent.
Burke: Don’t w-w-w-wet yourself, Embling!
Danny: (voice over) For some reason,
Instructor: Next!
Danny: (voice over) this caused the letters “H” as in h-h-Heaven and “W” as in
Gilby: Psychopath
Danny: (voice over) And “W” as in w-w-w-women to sometimes be uncertain.
Danny: (voice over) One thing about boarding school. Twenty for hours a day, you’re surrounded. Either you abandoned yourself and became a herd animal or you dug a cave deep to your head and skulked inside peering through your eyesockets. At the source of major solace and inspiration- our sister seat of learning: Saren Sister Ladies College. The two schools stared across the lake from eachother like brooding volcanoes. When I was alseep, I used to leave my body and drift the cold currents to the Saren Sister grounds where I hovered like a dark angel.
Gilby: She folds her legs... in doing so I glimpse Xanadu.
Danny: I would like to suggest that rugby football is the highest form of human endeavor. How can one go past the fluid 
inspiration of Jock Blair sprinting down the wing for a brilliant try.How can one not be moved to tears by the naked courage of a smaller player hurling himself at a much larger opponent, bouncing off but picking himself up again and again in a frenzy of guts and determination. Rugby foot ball embodies all the noblest virtues enshrined in a school like ours. Teamwork, bravery, pride, school spirit, creativity, intelligence, love of one’s fellow man. Surely the virtues which distinguish human beings from brute animals.
Thandiwe: Having listened carefully to the speakers of both sides, and wishing to be totally impartial, I fear the position for which my team is arguing is untenable. Where not for the tedious reasons given by our opponents, the last speaker excepted. My colleagues have quoted many ancient poets and philosophers to support our case that intellectual pursuits are the highest form of human endeavor. But most contemporary artists seem more interested in bodily functions. For example, “I don’t want you toast my bread. I don’t want you make my bed. I don’t want your money too. I just want to make love to you.” “Tutti frutti on rutti. Tutti frutti on rutti. Tutti frutti on rutti. A wop bop a loo mop a lop bam boom.” If these philosopher-poets are any guide, the so-called animal side of human beings leaves the intellectual side for dead. Is this just a recent development? Or are we only now becoming mature enough to reveal our dirty washing?
Danny: (voice over) People wonder how Hitler managed to get so many followers, its never surprised me.
Thandiwe: For a kid you’ve got some class.
Danny: Gosh.
Danny: (voice over) I started thinking about Africa. I realized the only images I knew were from old annuals, Tarzan comics and Hollywood movies. Cannibals with bones through their noses, lions tearing the throats out of antelopes. A lot of wonderous bruising words like Ninpopo, Zambisi, Mombasa, Tanganika...
Danny: (voice over) People like to have someone to look down on. Makes them feel better about themselves. Noone realizes what a great community service I was performing for being the school ____. I didn’t care, I’d met this girl.
Danny: (voice over) I wanted to see four steamrollers attached to Jock Blair’s arms and legs, driving in opposite directions, leaving only a twitching torso with flowing blood like a live hose. And I wanted even worse things to happen to her. In the mean time, I would make her ferociously jealous by pulling off the seduction of the century with Nicola Radcliffe.
Danny: (voice over) Thandiwe started telling me about Africa as she knew it. How her mother was killed during the MauMau (sp?) period in Kenya. How her father wrote books about African nationalism and the problems created as the colonial government scrambled to get out. There’d been terrible times the past few years... the Belgian Congo, Zanzibar, Angola, Kenya. Places I’d barely heard of.
Melissa: Whats happening?
Thandiwe: We’re just flirting.
Danny:(voice over) Often I never really heard what she said. I’d be staring at her legs. They were very comforting. ‘Cause sometimes there’d be little bruises or marks around her ankles from the elastic in her socks. Thats how come I knew she was real.
Danny:(voice over) I wondered if my old friend Jean Paul Sartre would’ve fought in a situation like this. I know Cassius would’ve. I’d like to beat Cassius. I like his pose. He wasn’t built like Twiggy though.
Danny: (voice over) I don’t think fate is a creature, or a lady. Like some 
people say. It’s the tide of events sweeping us along. But I’m not a fatalist because I believe you can swim against it. Sometimes grasp the hands of a clock face and steal a few precious minutes. If you don’t, you just cartwheel along and before you know it, the magic oppurtunitys’ lost. And for the rest of your life it lingers on in the part of your mind which dreams the very best dreams, taunting and tantalizing with what might have been.
Danny:(voice over) I realized I hadn’t any idea what she’d gone back to. Her letters came every week and in one she talked about one army officer called Idi Amin. And in another, how her stepmother had disappeared and she was looking after her brother and sister. I read in the papers that her father had bee executed. Then the letters stopped. After I was expelled, I went back home and worked in my dad’s pub. I 
was a bit like a sleepwalker. The old town hardly seemed real anymore. I spent my time writing to embassies and government agencies, even the prime minister. But mostly, I concentrated. An ether surrounds the world, washing over us all the time and all sorts of messages get transmitted through it. I had this dread I’d one day know she’d gone. I spent most of the time willing her to be all right. Sending... love I suppose. That word neither of us had used because we’re both too cool for that.
Thandiwe: (voice over) Danny, we’re in Nairobi now and finally safe. A lot of things have happened. I’m very different I think to I was when you last knew me. But I’m waiting for the time when we can sit down together and look into eachother’s eyes again. I look forward to that time more than I can say.
Danny:(voice over) Suddenly, there are much bigger worlds again. And some small place in it for me.
Thanks for visiting
Find other John Duigan films at Reel.com