ABSTRACT
The funniest scene in Scott Hicks’s Oscar-winning 1996 film Shine, about piano prodigy David Helfgott who has a mental breakdown, begins when Geoffrey Rush as Helfgott shambles into a bar to play a grand piano that stands idle. At this point in the film, Helfgott, late of London’s Royal College of Music, appears emblematic of a mental patient, replete with self-medicating cigarette. As he sits at the piano, a barroom bore looking for a cheap laugh hurls the ultimate piano-prodigy insult: ‘Sock it to us, Liberace’. Rush’s Helfgott displays no top-and-tails razzmatazz, of course; more like charity-shop couture. The would-be bar pianist seems to misrecognise the insult for what it was, social exclusion masked as a bad joke. At any rate, the jibe is Helfgott’s cue, and he begins to play, or rather, perform.
