Pun Salad

This 1991 Australian movie, Flirting, is a sequel to a 1987 Australian movie The Year My Voice Broke, which is unavailable at Netflix and Amazon Prime. A US-playable DVD of that previous movie will set you back a cool $119.99 at Amazon.

Wow! Why the availability difference? Easy explanation for that: Flirting has Nicole Kidman (albeit in a supporting role) and The Year My Voice Broke does not. (This was, IMDB says, Nicole's last Australian feature before she hit it big internationally.)

Anyway: it's the story of Danny (Noah Taylor) and Thandiwe (Thandie Newton), at their respective adjacent boys-only and girls-only schools in early-1960s Australia. Both are unusual, Danny being a nerdy intellectual fond of Sartre and Marx, Thandiwe being from Africa.

(By the way, anyone familiar with Thandie Newton's later films will find her 16-year-old self hard to recognize here.)

Both must put up with the respective prejudices of their loutish classmates. But they eventually acquire friends too, and also eventually find each other. Romance blooms. And complications ensue.

So it's kind of a sweet coming-of-age movie. Unfortunately, Thandie Newton apparently got abused by the writer/director, John Duigan. Kind of a down-under Harvey Weinstein She took 20 years to reveal this, but judging by his IMDB page, he's not done a lot movie-wise since that revelation.