Fourteen's Good, Eighteen's Better

(Seven Years On)

In FOURTEEN'S GOOD, EIGHTEEN'S BETTER, Gillian Armstrong re-introduces audiences to Diana, Josie and Kerry - three 18-year-old women living in suburban Adelaide. The film is a sequel to SMOKES AND LOLLIES, which Armstrong made four years earlier when the girls were 14. In this film, their current lives and views are counterpointed by flashbacks to their lives and expectations when they were 14.

The footage is intercut, juxtaposing the pimply, rough-edged young teens with their more subdued, assured and scarred 18-year-old selves. At 14 the great fear was pregnancy. Just after SMOKES AND LOLLIES, Josie fulfilled all parental prophecies by becoming pregnant. At 15, she lay alone in the maternity ward, visited only once by her own disappointed father. "I had plenty of flowers, anyway," she laughs. Josie rang the florists herself and ordered bouquets in the names of people she selected from the phone book. When she describes the weeks following the birth, spent in a furnished room with "no TV; just a clock, and it used to tick, all day long", the image is as lonely and as lucid as anything Bergman ever devised.

The film has a kind of black, wince-inducing wit as it contrasts the bold, free-thinking 14-year-olds with the constrained and authoritarian 18-year-olds, who are already planning regulations for their own offspring.