Cast: Hugo Weaving, Jacqueline McKenzie, Emma Lung, Matt Le Nevez, Sam Healy, Tyson Contor

Steph (Emma Lung) is a young half-Australian, half-Vietnamese girl whose parents were killed in an horrific car-accident moments before she was born. At the time, they were leaving the rural community of Swan Reach in hope of a better life. They didn’t quite make it.  Called 'the Miracle Baby' ever since, Steph has been brought up by Jude (Jacqueline McKenzie). Despite having been best friends with Steph's mother Jass, Jude has never talked much about her or her Vietnamese father, Johnny. On her 18th birthday when the film opens, Steph begins work at the same peach cannery where her parents worked and where Jude still works. Almost immediately she is pulled off the conveyor belt by manager Alan (Hugo Weaving) for being too slow.

When her grandfather presents her with her mother's diary as a birthday gift, it's a turning point for the undeveloped and over-protected Steph, who begins to explore who she might be. Through the diary she begins to discover her mother's personality and her relationship with Johnny. She finds out that her anxious adoptive mother Jude was once in love with Alan and when younger was as wildly joy-seeking as her mother was. Steph has a handicap in the dyslexia which meant she didn't finish school. In order to read her mother's diary, she secretly enlists the help of Alan's younger half brother Brian (Matt Le Nevez) who has had a wild past including a stint in jail. She is careful not to let the controlling Jude know any of her new directions.

The film is carried, perhaps too elliptically, on these two time lines 18 years apart, with Steph's forays into the diary illuminating a different social environment and painting a picture of the fiery Jass (Sam Healy), the jovial Johnny (Tyson Contor), a Vietnamese immigrant among many employed by the cannery, and the exuberant times they shared with Alan and Jude when youth allowed them to be rebellious and carefree. Contrasting with this is the far more serious mien of present-day Jude, who seems always to be worried about Steph, and the icily polite, barely suppressed hostility that exists between her and the equally serious Alan. Seeing them from Steph's point of view, we are not given quite enough of the others' stories, and it created a frustration in me quite apart from feeling Steph's frustration and her need to break free.

Steph's explorations include dressing up to go out in the distinctive elegance of Vietnamese dress for the first time, to the warm, approving smiles (but apparently no other involvement) of the other Vietnamese workers. Here she looks like an exotic flower, completely out of place.

Secretly she begins to explore her sexuality in an affair with Alan. He's estranged from his wife and kids and living in the hotel where the dangerous possibility of discovery by Jude and other cannery-hands who gather there after work adds spice to the risk. Risk is also what entices Alan into this affair as a taste of what he has forgone as he's grown older. It's obvious that Steph has chosen Alan as part of her need also to bridge the gap with the past. She's chosen Alan, and not the more erratic Brian, who is closer to her age. In the lack of sexual chemistry between them it's apparent that she's taking this initiation into adulthood cautiously rather than passionately. Discovery is inevitable and catalyses a much needed change. Her final act of liberation in the film, however, is with the more free-thinking Brian, and marks the escape her parents were prevented from completing by their death.

Parts of the story have a tone of stagnation and desultory aimlessness which threatens to suffocate Steph, the bright segments of fun seeming too brittle to last. Its background of social realism is depressing too. In the deteriorating industrial situation at the cannery, the present-day rise of enterprise bargaining marks the failure of Trade Unionism. 18 years before, hard-won employee security meant workers revelled in their solidarity with group activities at the end of work shifts and spontaneous theatrical entertainments (by Jude and Jass) on the gallery above the factory floor. The work environment was far more fun and the feeling is of a family, though Jude, Alan and their friends were passionate about workers' rights and conditions. The  separation between workers and management in the present-day cannery makes for an anxious workforce looking over their shoulders at management on the gallery watching them. Ironically, Alan is now part of the productivity-centred management which disempowers the still feisty Jude. At the end of a long, hard (and useless) bargaining session with union rep Jude, he announces that the factory is to be sold and dismantled. It marks the end of an era and a way of life for the entire district. For Jude it's indicative of the oppressive direction Alan is following and his final traitorous act against the optimism of their youth.

Terrific though the performances are, I was disappointed in a few areas where the movie doesn't quite gel. There's a certain lack of clarity or definition in the direction. Director Craig Monahan is responsible for the intensely gripping and much under-rated The Interview (1998) while writer Sue Smith has some superb, absorbing dramas to her credit, so expectations were high. The debut performance of Emma Lung is a touch too understated and perhaps, overwhelmed. While she aptly shows Steph's impressionable naiveté as well as her determination to break out of her limiting upbringing, she seems not to be informing the role enough, and there is scant on-screen connection between her and the nuanced, veteran talents of Hugo Weaving and Jacqueline McKenzie. (Nevertheless, in another wonderful Sue Smith ensemble drama filmed in the same year [The Cooks, TV], Lung has more evident fire and definition in her performance.)

Peaches has much going for it with performances, story and characters that are authentic and memorable. The beautiful South Australian Riverland is an appropriately sleepy setting for this drama spanning two generations, with its themes of coming of age amid youthful dreams lost and found.

© Avril Carruthers        12th June 2005