Plot
Danny Embling (Noah Taylor), now an awkward, underdeveloped 17 year old, has been sent away by his parents to the all-male St. Albans boarding school in rural New South Wales, Australia, in the hopes he won’t become a delinquent. The year is 1965 and it has been some time since Danny has had any romantic relationship with a girl (his former love, Freya, from The Year My Voice Broke, left him at the end of the first film). Danny is the butt of jokes because of his stutter and long nose (for which he is nicknamed "Bird"). His only friend is Gilbert.
At a school rugby game, he meets and slowly becomes interested in Thandiwe Adjewa (Thandie Newton), a Ugandan-Kenyan-British girl (Ugandan father and Kenyan-British mother) attending the all-girls Cirencester Ladies’ College across the lake, while her father, a political activist, is lecturing at university in Canberra. They later meet at a debate between the two schools, and covertly during a school dance. She is punished for leaving the dance without permission and is given chores by the prefect, Nicola Radcliffe (Nicole Kidman). Thandiwe is later befriended by Melissa (Kym Wilson) and Janet (Naomi Watts).
Throughout the course of the school year, they foster a budding romance, despite the overbearing regulations inflicted upon them - specifically racial politics and social conventions (Thandiwe is often regarded by the school authorities as rebellious and overtly sexual). After the performance of the musical, Danny introduces his parents to Thandiwe and her parents. They later decide to return to Uganda in response to the political turmoil there. Soon Thandwie decides to return too, and lies about her true departure date, in order to spend the night in a motel with Danny. They are discovered, leading to his expulsion. Thandiwe writes him letters regularly from Uganda - until one day one arrives from Nairobi saying she is safe there.
Read more about this topic: Flirting (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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