Swimming Upstream Themes

INTRODUCTION

Swimming Upstream is a 2003 Australian drama film directed by Russell Mulcahy. It shows the life of Fingleton from childhood to adulthood, and dealing with a loving family. Shine is a 1996 Australian drama film based on the life of David Helfgott, who suffered a mental breakdown and spent years in institutions. The screenplay was directed by Scott Hicks. These movies both involve characters, actions and themes to make the audience feel emotions throughout the Australian films.

CHARACTERS

Inside the movies they both contain protagonist and antagonist characters and both have a father and son relationship, the son being the protagonist and the father being antagonist. Harrold Fingleton the father from swimming upstream is an antagonist

character, for example he’s an arrogant alcoholic who is treated like the man of the house. Harrold taught his sons to use violence to solve their problems and be competitive. He works in a lower – class job to support his family, when he comes home expects dinner to be handed to him instead of helping out with the household chores. Harrold deals with his emotions by getting angry at his family and by drinking. Whether in the movie Shine Peter, David’s father, because of having a lost family member during the Nazi Holocaust he is determined to keep his family together at all cost. David helfgott, the son, got offered a scholarship to study in London but with his father being protective of losing a family member, told him not to go. David got the confidence of leaving his family behind to go on his scholarship. Both the fathers in the movies are aggressive, manipulative and controlling, they just care about success.
ACTION
In the movie Shine, Scott Hides the director, has a wide variety of techniques to show action inside the movie. For example, right at the start in Shine when David plays the piano, Scott uses music as a technique to build the tension up for the audience to feel emotion by the music. He also uses sound to impact the audience’s emotion as well, especially in the scene when David is performing and the music of the piano blurs off into the background to hear his heart beat. The sound of his heart beat makes the audience feel nervous to be watching such an important scene. This scene can also make the audience feel intrigued to what’s going to happen next. Comparing to Russel Mulchy, director of Swimming Upstream. Both directors have similar techniques to make the audience feel involved in the movies, but one thing that Scott didn’t use was a multiple camera shots like what Russel uses for Swimming Upstream. During one of the main races Russel used multiple camera shots to show the crowd, Family and the sons that participated in the race all at one time, this was used to make the audience see everybody’s emotion and reactions throughout the race so they can feel fascinated by what’s going to happen.

THEME
Swimming Upstream has a lot of different themes throughout the movie, but water is a symbolic escape and is a major theme in the movie.

Rivalry is also a theme used in this movie, for instance when Tony and john competed against each other in a race, they were trying to win their fathers love and affection, so they were rivalling against each other for it. Love is another major theme, the children of Harrold would do anything for their mother, Dora Fingleton, when their father was being abusive whilst drunk they would stuck up for Dora because their love for her was so strong. Shine touches on themes as diverse as the nature of genius, the triumph over adversity and the destructive power of love. There is an undeniable kindship and the extreme courage of an individual. Love is the major theme in shine. The movie shows two most extreme sides of love. The first is Peter’s obsessive and domineering love. Scott Hides defies us to label Peter as just another abusive father trying to live vicariously through a son, but at times he can be comforting and gentle and his feelings for David are genuine, but there are instances when violence and outbreaks has cruel results within the movie. The other face of love is the healing, undemanding one, as Gillian offers her strength and understanding to David, helping him rebuild his

life.
CONCLUSION
These movies both use successful techniques, which create character development which then improves into theme and action scenes. After analysing Swimming Upstream and Shine they both have shown that the sons have always had trouble meeting their father’s expectations. John and Tony follow their talents to reach their goals in life. Russel Malcahy and Scott Hicks both produced interesting Australian films that are based on true stories.