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She may not know what she wants but she knows it isn’t this. Sybylla (Judy Davis) is the eldest daughter of a very-big family living in middle-of-nowhere Australia, and at 16 is certain the two fates thought most realistic for her — either helping run the family farm full time or marrying a guy with good prospects (it’s the late 1800s) — are totally wrong for her. “I don’t want to be in the bush forever — I might as well be dead,” she moans to her younger sister. What Sybylla thinks is right is a lofty career of her own. She feels she belongs to the world of “art and literature and music and culture and elegance,” though she hasn’t quite yet decided which faction best fits her. Maybe music — what she knows for sure is that she can hold her own pretty well interpreting Schumann on the clanking house piano. 

In Gillian Armstrong’s terrific feature-film debut, My Brilliant Career (1979), Sybylla is given some time and grace to think things through, and in a location luckily not her claustrophobic childhood home. Her rich maternal grandmother (Aileen Britton) invites the teen to stay in her mansion awhile to see how naturally Sybylla fits in with high society. Though not without her moments of familiar teenage self-consciousness — Sybylla at one point sniffles on her aunt’s (Wendy Hughes) shoulder that she’s ugly and no one loves her — this young woman maintains her pluckiness, refusing to shrink herself in a way that alternately charms and infuriates the people in her newfound social circle. She always has a funny retort sitting in the back of her throat awaiting a release; she also continues maintaining that she wants a career rather than something like — and she says it with a kind of nose-upturned disgust — a marriage. 

Marriages have historically never wound up very happy in Sybylla’s family. Her aunt’s husband left her, and Mom and Dad are only together at this point out of obligation. Sybylla’s marital aversion keeps getting tested, though, by her well-off childhood friend Harry (Sam Neill), whose family still socializes with Grandma. In addition to being a kind of handsome hard not to gawk at, Harry has a quiet kindness and patience that suggests Sybylla could have the nebulous but nonetheless intensely wanted career and someone to come home to if she embarked on a life with him. (What Sybylla can be assured of is that Harry is far and away better than Frank, a soon-to-be-extraordinarily-rich jackaroo played by Robert Grubb whom Sybylla thinks is obnoxious but whom everyone thinks she’d be wise to say yes to if he dares propose.)  

A both-sides-win conclusion would round out what would make a perfectly good romantic comedy. And given how likable Harry is and the easiness of Neill and Davis’ chemistry, it’ll be natural for many viewers to want things to end up that way. How could you not after watching those dreamy sequences of them horsing around her grandma’s estate coquettishly whacking each other with pillows, of them another day on a serene canoe trip Sybylla purposely sabotages (she tips the boat over) so the two can swim ashore together and then race home after almost-but-not kissing?

But this adaptation of Miles Franklin’s semi-autobiographical 1901 novel of the same name — published when she was just 21 — is assertive, just like its spitfire heroine, that, spoiler alert, this is not to be a work about one headstrong young woman’s slow-burning “taming.” Instead, it’s an ode to her self-possession in a world that prefers she pursue the socially acceptable rather than the wanted. 
Sybylla’s family is united in thinking she’s simply deluded by illusions of grandeur — something Dad thinks comes from Mom’s side of the family. But what she’s really experiencing is a self-respect too strong to settle for what she deems less. She’d rather experience professional failure than agree to a romance that could very well stall that professional chanciness altogether. Sybylla’s grandmother warns that loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence. But you can tell that Sybylla, who for once doesn’t reply with a snappy comeback, might be thinking she’d actually pay anything she had to to guarantee autonomy. It’s something for which no sacrifice, to her mind, is too great. She’ll defer the regret to a later date.

Technically not much happens in the beautifully filmed My Brilliant Career. It’s mostly a lot of time spent with upper-class relatives, flirting with and continuing to lead on the ever-patient Harry, and then, toward the end, having to work as a governess and housekeeper against her will for a family her father owes. But Davis’ amazing, persuasively wild-at-heart performance — with that wildness externalized by her ravenous eyes and frizzy hair with a mind of its own — makes everything feel consequential. Davis suggests Sybylla isn’t so much living life as consuming it, vacuuming every iota of it clean so she has plenty of material to help her figure out just what she wants to do with her life. When she eventually settles on writing, it’s hardly a surprise: few mediums are so hospitable to the surfeit of critical observation and longing that so define her. My Brilliant Career’s ending feels like a beginning — the first stages of one’s potential finally being seen through.