My Brilliant Career (Blu-ray)

Judy Davis stars in Gillian Armstrong’s breakthrough, a period romance as unconventional as its brash heroine.

For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong (Little Women) drew on teenage author Miles Franklin’s novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the conventions of period romance.

Headstrong young Sybylla Melvyn (Davis, in a star-making performance), bemoans her stifling life in the backcountry, where her writerly ambitions receive little encouragement, and craves independence above all else. When a handsome landowner (Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill), disarmed by her unruly charms, begins to court her, Sybylla must decide whether she can reconcile the prospect of marriage with the illustrious life’s work she has imagined for herself.

Suffused with generous humour and a youthful appetite for experience, My Brilliant Career is a luminous portrait of an ardently free spirit.

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, approved by director Gillian Armstrong, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• Audio commentary from 2009 featuring Armstrong
• New interview with Armstrong
• Interview from 1980 with actor Judy Davis
• New interview with production designer Luciana Arrighi
• One Hundred a Day (1973), a student short film by Armstrong
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Carrie Rickey