What Is The Father Son Relationship In Swimming Up Mainstream

Scott Hicks 1996 Australian drama film, Shine shares family relations, success and failure with the 2003 Australian film, Swimming Upstream, directed by Russel Mulcahy. Shine follows the success of a musician, likewise it’s comparative text Swimming Upstream highlights the success of an athlete. The audience follows the 1950 settings of two young boys and their journey of success, despite the difficulties of their dysfunctional families, in particular their controlling fathers. Together the film makers utilise a variety of cinematic and language techniques to develop the intensity within action scenes, characters and theme which together provides two engaging and relative Australian films.

Mulcahy and Hicks both incorporate action scenes within

Throughout the films, the film makers present the relationships between the sons and their fathers at different stages and express the negative impact the fathers have on their sons towards the end of the movie. Hicks employs dialogue ‘And next time… What are we going to do? We are going to win.’ (ClickView 2:43 – 2:49) in the home piano scene to depict the father’s striving attitude for David to improve and succeed. Contrastingly, Mulcahy explores the father/son relationship in ‘I was always a little afraid of my father. From my earliest memory, there was nothing I could do to please him’ (YouTube) to communicate that Tony’s success was looked passed by his father which was instead focused on his brother, John. The film makers emphasise the troubling down fall of their father/son relationships by closely illustrating the father’s expressions towards the son’s failures and success’ which in turn impact their relationship in the long run. Hicks abruptly demonstrates this with dialogue ‘The thing is, I feel nothing’ (ClickView 1:05 – 1:11chapter 20) when David is standing over his father’s grave. Contrastingly, Mulcahy expresses the downfall of the relationship between Tony and his father by showing Tony’s father as unresponsive to Tony with facial expressions and additional dialogue ‘have a good life’ in the ending scene of Swimming Upstream (YouTube 1:11:17 – 1:12:38). Shine and Swimming Upstream similarly show the remaining characters displaying little to no emotion towards the relationship in both scenes which correspondingly convey how their relationships ended. Evidently, both Hicks and Mulcahy assist the audience in connecting to the emotional impact the father/son relationship has had on the two main characters over