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Freda Freiberg

18 Sepetmber, 1933 — 26 April, 2024

Other Film

Batchelor Girl by Rivka Hartman: Article in Australian Jewish News, 3 December 1987.

Matchmaking relatives and the professional woman: new ABC-TV play
By FREDA FREIBERG, Australian Jewish News 3 December 1987
 

Dot Bloom is a soap-opera scriptwriter wno spends her time in between re-writes escaping from the clutches of Auntie Esther and Uncle Isaac. They are trying to match her up with a single Jewish male doctor, and contemplating a relationship with an attractive divorced white male lawyer, whose conversation and friends are stupifyingly boring. Dorothy Bloom’s situation is only too familiar to the growing number of professional Jewish women in our community for whom it is difficult to find a suitable male partner. Estranged by helpful,but patronising relatives (you’re still attractive, darling, if only you’d make the most of yourself), she is unimpressed by the available prospects who desire love and companionship but are not prepared to degrade themselves.

Dot is the heroine of Rivka Hartman’s first feature-length comedy drama, Bachelor Girl, which has been pre-sold to the ABC.  However, it could have a theatrical release, not only because it is a delightfully witty film, but also because so many women in our community can identity with its heroine. In the lead role of Dot, Lyn Pierse is superb, alternately speedy and deflated. She is ideally matched by her co-star Kim Gyngell, who is gawky and ghastly. They are well supported by a team of experienced eccentric character actors including Bruce Spence as Dot’s friend Alistair, Jan Friedel as her confidante Helen and Ruth Yaffe as Auntie Esther.
 

Rivka Hartman, the daughter of two medical practitioners, Len Hartman and the late Dora Bialystok, was born and bred in Lygon Street, Carlton, where her father was the local doctor. She became involved in experimental theatre at La Mama while studying medicine at Melbourne University in the early ’70s. She played roles in La Mamma’s productions of Dimboola and The Coming of Stork, and she wrote and directed two plays there — Dream Girl and The Psychiatrist.

Abandoning Melbourne and medicine, she went to Sydney in 1977 to study screen writing at the Australian Film and Television School. In 1978 she rejected a job offer at Crawfords to concentrate on personal work, and soon after made Consolation Prize (which she wrote, directed and starred in) and A Most Attractive Man, two short films which were screened around Australia in AFI theatres to appreciative audiences. A tough few years fol lowed her initial success for it took her four years to get Bachelor Girl off the ground. The script was developed with the support of the Australian Film Commission, but the film’s production was largely funded by Film Victoria, which drew her back home to Melbourne.
 

In the meantime, Rivka is not idly resting on her laurels, but collaborating with Tobsha Learner (another talent ed young Jewish writer, author of Witch Play) on another film script, atragi-comedy with the tentative title of Judith.