PHOTO BY LISA TOMASETTI
Far left: Lynn Redgrave as Gillian has a
moment with Geoffrey Rush as Helfgott.
Left: Armin Mueller-Stahl as Helfgott's
demanding father Peter.
PHOTO BY MARK TI LLIE
Below: John Gielgud as Cecil Parkes with
Noah Taylor as Helfgott as a young man.
put together. They were useful
to me in getting into the
rhythms of David's syntax.
They were Berlitz on how to
speak David Helfgott," Rush
explained.
It also meant studying with
a piano teacher for three or so
months. As a character actor,
Rush said, he wanted to do his
own "stunts" so the audience
will not sense any "trickery."
"I said to Scott, 'You have to
have all of me in the scene," he
said.
What he didn't do was re-
search Helfgott's background
as a Jew. Rush had played one
Jewish role, that of an expatri-
ate psychiatrist in a Patrick
White play.
"I suppose I kind of connect-
ed with [Helfgott] in an artistic
sense. I come from Brisbane, a
regional city in Australia, and
David comes from Perth. To be
The tension between David and his father forms the backdrop of
the story, and in subtle turns, shows us how a parent's frustrated de-
sires can suffocate and, in this case, emotionally maim his children.
The bar mitzvah scene has little poignancy or meaning; it is framed
not as a rite of passage but as yet another fulfillment of Peter Helf-
gott's (Armin Mueller-Stahl) directives. Aside from a few identifiably
Jewish characters and images, however, Shine is void of ethnic con-
tent.
David's mental breakdown, the film's climax, occurs during a recital
in London when he plays Rachmaninoffs Piano Concerto No. 3, an
extremely difficult composition which his father Peter (Armin Mueller-
Stahl) has practically ordered him to learn, despite the misgivings
of an early piano teacher.
The camera becomes the narrator here, taking us on a dizzyingly
intimate tour of David's artistry: his nimble hands and pounding feet,
the droplets of sweat on the tip of his nose, the vibrating interior of
the piano, and finally his collapse on stage, in a heap.
We next see him back in Australia, in a sanitarium, unable to
recognize his own sister.
Most of Shine concentrates on the first three "movements" of Helf-
gott's life; his marriage to Gillian (Lynn Redgrave) and his return to
the stage serve as a sunny epilogue to an emotionally exhausting ride.
It is more than welcome.
Shine is a finely tuned film, beautifully acted and directed.
—Julie Edgar
a Jewish-Polish family would've
been quite unusual in the '50s.
There would have been a com-
munity isolation. I connected
with that somehow, more from
a regional point of view.
"There was nothing specific
about David's Jewishness that
impacted on my area of the
role. There was the notion talk-
ing to some Jewish friends
about the aspect of being a gen-
eration below Holocaust sur-
vivors, just touching on that
experience," Rush said.
Hicks' film forms an arc that
takes off from Helfgott's poor
beginnings in Perth. The son of
a willful, demanding father
(Armin Mueller-Stahl) who has
lost his family in the Holocaust,
the young Helfgott follows
along impassively, showing his
genius only when he's at the pi-
ano.
As a teen-ager, Helfgott de-
fies his father for the first time
in his life and accepts a schol-
arship to the Royal Academy of
Music in London. His time
there is marked by a healthy
relationship with his teacher
Cecil Parkes (John Gielgud)
and his final breakdown, which
may or may not be induced by
the pressures his father has
placed on him.
Helfgott crashes after deliv-
ering a brilliant performance
of Rachmaninoff s Piano Con-
certo No. 3 — a piece his father
has ordered him to learn, de-
spite its difficulty.
Rush appears when Helfgott
returns to Australia as an
adult, emotionally and intel-
lectually crippled. Slowly, he
returns to the piano but never
quite emerges from a mental
cocoon. He lives in a small room
and spends his time chain-
smoking and mumbling to him-
self.
When he shows up at a cafe
after hours, banging on the
windows to be let in from a
pounding rain, he sits down at
a piano and finds he has a rapt
audience and a new circle of
friends. From there, he is in-
troduced to his future wife
Gillian (Lynn Redgrave), and
gradually he finds some sem-
blance of normalcy in his life.
Helfgott, who now is doing ma-
jor concert tours in Europe and
Australia, is by no means re-
turned to what is regarded as
full sanity, but he is, Rush said,
a "fulfilled man."
"The film doesn't want to
suggest there's a cure, but
somehow, there's a misguided
love of the father that becomes
a key part of David's physical
and mental disintegration that
is ultimately restored by this
redemptive love from Gillian.
"I think the film is not sug-
gesting there's a cure, but that
there's a way to keep going,
keep carrying on," Rush said.
At Shine's premiere in Ade-
laide, Hicks' hometown, the au-
dience was on its feet clapping
uproariously. Helfgott, unbe-
knownst to anyone, was there,
and when the audience learned
of his presence "nearly tore the
place apart," Rush recalled.
In the swirl of the press,
Rush never really got to talk to
Helfgott about the film. But he
heard from Gillian that Helf-
gott "laughed a lot and cried a
lot and proclaimed it to be the
best film since Ben Hur."