OSCAR AND LUCINDA

Book by Peter Carey (1988)

Movie directed by Gillian
Amstrong (1997)

PRESENTED BY: NGUYEN VAN

10/27/2023 1
QUYNH
 CONTENT

INTRODUCTION PLOT VISUAL REPRESENTATION

OF 2 MAIN CHARACTERS

• Book author • Plot phases and • Oscar

• Book’s original relevant comments • Lucinda
idea • Their costumes
• Book’s recognition • Minor detail
• Movie director
• Movie’s recognition
• Cast

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INTRODUCTION
 BORN

May 7, 1943 (age 80 years),

Bacchus Marsh, Australia.

BOOKS

Oscar and Lucinda,

True History of the Kelly Gang

AWARDS

Awards: Booker Prize, AACTA

Award for Best Adapted
Screenplay in Film
ABOUT THE BOOK AUTHOR
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PETER CARAY’S SHARE
ORIGINS OF OSCAR AND LUCINDA
INTERVIEWED BY GUARDIAN BOOK
CLUB

HOW RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE PROVIDED THE SPARKS FOR

HIS NOVEL

He is not a Christian, but he He contemplated about Promised

had certainly grown up asking Land, where 200 years before
God to bless his mother and the book, it had been filled with
father, and once kept score of Aboriginal stories rather than
God's responses to his prayers. Christian stories

He was imagining the moment that box of Christian

stories came floating or cutting through the
landscape filled with Aboriginal stories.

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PETER CARAY’S SHARE
ORIGINS OF OSCAR AND LUCINDA
INTERVIEWED BY GUARDIAN BOOK
CLUB

HOW RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE PROVIDED THE SPARKS FOR

HIS NOVEL

“Why would anyone float a church along a river?

Might it be to demonstrate some prefabricated building method for pioneers?
Might it be a bet?

What about Pascal? Didn't he say to believe in God was to make a bet? (If
you were right, if there was a god, you won big time. If you were wrong,
you'd lived a good life just the same.) I thought of betting, poker, chance, the
Bible, the Melbourne Cup, drawing lots, the ­n otion that chance was the wish
of God. But why would anyone build a church like that?

I talked to my friend Richard Leplastrier. I said, didn't the Victorians have some
prefabricated technology that involved cast iron?
They did, he said, but only for glass-houses. Why do you want to know?
So I told him.
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And he said, well, why don't you have a glass church ?”
OSCAR AND LUCINDA BOOK’S RECOGNITION

• Booker prize, 1988

• “[Oscar & Lucinda] is very, very hard to put down. There are many
pleasures to be had here, chief among them the author’s gift for telling
fascinating, entertaining stories . . . . Like the characters of Charles
Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, Mr. Carey’s creations are real in the
simplest human sense.” —Washington Times

• “A kind of rollercoaster ride . . . .The reader emerges . . . gasping,

blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is
never going to look the same again.” —The Washington Post Book
World

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ABOUT THE MOVIE DIRECTOR

December 18, 1950 (age 72 years),

B O RN Melbourne, Australia

My Brilliant Career, Little Women,

MO V I E S The Last Days of Chez Nous, and
Mrs. Soffel

AWA RD S AFI Best Director Award

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 CAST

CATE BLA​N CHETT​ RALPH FIENNCES​ CIARAN HINDS​​ BILLIE BROWN​​

Lucinda Leplastrier Oscar Hopskin​ Reverend Dennis Hasset​ Percy Smith​

20XX 9
 CAST

JOSEPHINE BYRNES​ CLIVE RUSSELL MATYELOK GIBBS​ BARNABY KAY​

Miriam Chadwick Theophilus Mrs. William Wardley Fish

BARRY OTTO LEVERNE GILLIAN JONES FIONA PRESS

MCDONNELL
Jimmy D’Abbs Mss Malcolm Elizabeth Leplastrier Mrs. Trevis

20XX 10
OSCAR AND LUCINDA MOVIE’S RECOGNITION

• AACTA Award Best Cinematography in Film - 1998 · Geoffrey

Simpson
• AACTA Award for Best Original Score in Film - 1998 · Thomas
Newman
• AACTA Award Best Costume Design in Film - 1998 · Janet Patterson
• AACTA Award for Best Production Design in Film - 1998 · Luciana
Arrighi
• AACTA Award for Best Sound in Film - 1998 · Ben Osmo, Andrew
Plain, Gethin Creagh

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PLOT
 PLOT
1. About Oscar, who struggles
with his religious beliefs and
has a wild obsession with
gambling.
2. About Lucinda, an
unconventional Australian
woman who is independent and
wealthy, with compulsion to
gambling. She inherits a glass
factory from her father and
becomes obsessed with
glassmaking.
The film carefully introduces each
of the characters. Oscar (Ralph
Fiennes) associates the sea with
death from a very early stage (the
death of the mother); Lucinda
(Cate Blanchett) does not fear the
sea but loves glass for its 'liquid'
qualities and for its strength. So,
Armstrong weaves a pattern of
contrasts out of these and other
leitmotifs.
- (Younis, 1998)
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 PLOT
. "In order that I exist," says
Carey's nameless narrator,
"two gamblers,
one Obsessive, the other
Compulsive, must meet".
Lucinda follows a path
to Oscar "as complex as that
of a stainless steel Pachinko
ball“ (Mullan, 2010)
3. Oscar and Lucinda meet on a
trip to Australia, fall in love, are
on a bet to construct the glass
church in the wilderness, enduring
numerous hardships along the
way. The church itself becomes a
symbol of their love and their
shared unconventional passions,
and it changes their life forever.
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PLOT
STORY
When he finally makes it to Boat Harbor,
Oscar is very ill, cowardly and easily gets
married to a manipulative woman, named
Miriam. Soon after, Oscar drowns, and his
wife claims the fortune Lucinda leaves him .
MOVIE
As Miriam is pregnant with Oscar's child,
Hasset burns the papers confirming the
wager, not wanting Lucinda's money to be
inherited by her. She dies shortly after their
son born. The child then is adopted by
Lucinda.
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 VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
 DETAILS OF CHARACTER’S TRAITS
Visual representation of Oscar and Lucinda

OSCAR

VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
OF BOOK DETAILS
IN MOVIE
“Antheas with fragile white tentacles, red-bannered-dulses,
NARRATION
perhaps a sleek green prawn or a fragile living blossom, proof
(FOCUSING ON OSCAR AND LUCINDA)
of the existence of God, a miracle in ivory, rosy red, orange or
amethyst”

Oscar has red hair “that frizzy nest which grew outwards,
horizontal like a windblown tree in an Italianate painting”
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 DETAILS OF CHARACTER’S TRAITS
Visual representation of Oscar and Lucinda

LUCINDA

VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
OF BOOK DETAILS
IN MOVIE

Usage of sophisticated accessory

NARRATION
(FOCUSING ON OSCAR AND LUCINDA)

Made ladylike for her trip to Sydney, her hair is

pinned and clipped: "Her hair was a sea of
snakes, each one struggling to insist on its
freedom.“ (Mullan, 2010). 18
 DETAILS OF CHARACTER’S TRAITS
Visual representation of Oscar and Lucinda

OSCAR AND LUCINDA COSTUME MATCH

VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
OF BOOK DETAILS
IN MOVIE
NARRATION
(FOCUSING ON OSCAR AND LUCINDA)

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 DETAILS OF CHARACTER’S TRAITS
Visual representation of Oscar and Lucinda

OSCAR AND LUCINDA COSTUME UNMATCHED

VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
OF BOOK DETAILS
IN MOVIE
NARRATION
(FOCUSING ON OSCAR AND LUCINDA)

Oscar and Lucinda’ bet on glass church

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 DETAILS OF CHARACTER’S TRAITS
Minor details in the childhood of Oscar and Lucinda that
leads their path to the building of the glass church
OSCAR LUCINDA

VISUAL
REPRESENTATION
OF BOOK DETAILS
On Christmas Day, his father said, “You “…. and the one in question, the
IN MOVIE have reclassified your buttons, I see.” first one Lucinda saw-at an age
The buttons were on the window ledge. It when she had dimples on her knees-
NARRATION was a deep sill. Mrs. Williams had put was a particularly beautiful
(FOCUSING ON OSCAR AND LUCINDA) the buttons there when she set the specimen, twisted red and milk-
table. Oscar said, “Yes, Father.” white glass from the damp brick
“The taxonomic principle being colour. island of Murano ….”
The spectrum from left to right, with size
the second principle of order.”
“Yes, Father.”
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 • Carey, P. (2010). Week Three: Peter Carey on the origins of Oscar and
Lucinda. The Guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/20/peter-carey-oscar-and-l
ucinda

• Mullan, J. (2010). Oscar and Lucinda by Perter Carey, Week one:

chance. The Guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/06/peter-carey-oscar-and-l
ucinda
REFERENCES

• Mullan, J. (2010). Oscar and Lucinda by Perter Carey, Week two:

visualization. The Guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/13/oscar-lucinda-peter-car
ey-bookclub

• Younis, R. (1998). Cinema Papers. Retrieved from:

https://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/oscar-and-lucinda
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THANK YOU

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