A young woman falls in love with a young man who lives and works in Stirling, in the Adelaide Hills. Entranced by the man and the town, she begins to feel a sense of excitement and vitality in her life. A lively but also melancholic musical, where every line is sung.
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An independently financed, low-budget movie made with a small, tight, committed cast and crew, My Darling in Stirling is, surprisingly and ambitiously, a musical. Completely musical, from beginning to end, in the vein of Jacques Demy's operetta-style The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Mousoulis tackles the musical genre from an atypical but fitting angle. His cinema since the early 1980s has traced the small, melancholic dramas of everyday relationships, the disappointments, rifts, disillusionments, separations, epiphanies … Turning all that, in 2023, into what Mousoulis describes as a “fairy-tale realist musical” gives a result that is sad, touching and ultimately uplifting.
It is in the approach to generating the music score that the film shows a really radical difference from conventional Hollywood musical. The performances are derived from the online Free Music Archive, on top of which Mousoulis has superimposed his own melodies and lyrics. Some cast members sing with their own voices, and others mime the tracks. The evident artifice and the wishful, dreamy aspect of the musical genre are therefore foregrounded, interrogated, and developed in a new way. And it takes place in a special part of the Australian state of Adelaide: a utopian little town named Stirling. (Adrian MARTIN | Film Critic)
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Innersense Productions | bill@innersense.com.au
Bill MOUSOULIS
