My Brilliant Career Review: Feminist Period Drama on Netflix About a Woman Choosing Herself
My Brilliant Career | Creator: Liz Doran | Cast: Philippa Northeast, Jake Dunn, Christopher Chung | Netflix
A woman should swim, swear, eat like a man, ride like a man. She should decide her fate like a man. This is just one of the many declarations Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast) makes in My Brilliant Career, an adaptation of the 1901 Miles Franklin novel.
The 1979 movie incarnation starring Judy Davis and the late Sam Neill was a classic. Set in turn-of-the century Australia, the show tracks the life of Sybylla as she goes from being the feral rustic daughter of a down-on-his-luck farmer to a sophisticate ripe enough for, not marriage, but a brilliant writing career. Reluctant to acknowledge the reality of the times that the only way a woman could have money was to marry into it, Sybylla struggles against it even as she discovers love and friendship with not one suitor, but two.
The series becomes less about her choosing between two yearning men, Frank Hawden (Jake Dunn) and Harry Beecham (Christopher Chung) and more about choosing herself. With contemporary music and the trademark requirements of a period bodice ripper— wet shirts, forearm flexes, and decorous sex, all filmed from the female gaze—My Brilliant Career becomes Sybylla’s yearning for a full life, a life to think like a man, write like a man and earn like a man, and releasing the “trapped energy of women”. Set in 1900, it is still all too relevant. And delectable.