Oscar & Lucinda is a quiet, eccentric romance about two outsiders whose oddities draw them together and whose flaws ultimately keep them apart. Based on Peter Carey’s novel, the film follows Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier, compulsive gamblers bound by obsession, faith, and longing in Victorian Australia. Their love story is tender, strange, and devastating, shaped as much by moral conviction and fear as by chance.

I am always on the lookout for adorable, eccentric protagonists. Two compatible weirdos whom the world does not understand. Nobody fits the bill better than Oscar & Lucinda. This quirky Australian film, based on a novel of the same name, follows the lives of two compulsive (or obsessive?) gamblers who meet and fall in love, but a twist of misfortune keeps them apart.

They are both social outcasts because of their eccentricities. Oscar is a gangly young man with obsessive behaviors, who enjoys categorizing his dead mother’s button collection by color, size, and pattern, for fun. His autistic behavior earns the scorn of the boys at the college, but a stranger wanders into his rooms by accident and introduces him to his lifelong obsession with gambling. Oscar is studying to become a minister and feels torn between his obsessive gambling addiction and his need to be above moral reproach. He will bet on anything from cockfights to the horse track, and stuff everything he wins but doesn’t need into the poor box at the church. He has a pathological fear of water and of drowning, since a childhood incident in which he saw his father cast his mother’s clothes out to sea after her death. “The sea,” the narrator tells us, “became forever entwined with death for Oscar.”

Oscar has rationalized away his addiction with the belief God cannot “look down upon a poor chap wagering a few quid on the outcome of a race,” because God asks us to “wager our immortal soul on His existence. We bet that He exists, and we risk everything!” But once he “plays for pleasure,” he becomes so wrenched with guilt, he suffers a nervous breakdown. Eventually, his addiction turns him into a social outcast, and he swears off gambling forever.

Lucinda is compulsive about gambling and admits to even setting up a card game on a sea voyage to “trap the steward into playing, since I know him to like cards.” Instead, she plays with Oscar when he comes to take her confession. She, too, has strange behaviors, and a love of categorizing things… she arranges her glass collection meticulously according to her own system and doesn’t want her maid to clear it away. She’s obsessed with glass, and purchases a glassworks on impulse, out of a desire to relive the experience she had as a child in which she smashed a Prince Rupert’s Drop. It burst into an explosion of color and sound, and she regrets she could not keep the lovely thing. As an heiress, Lucinda is oblivious to the fact that every gamble was “one less brick in the foundation of her fortune.”

They are undeniably flawed but utterly adorable. One scene of them challenging each other to a scrubbing game to see who can win first is delightful. “Cute,” as my mother put it. Lucinda is a free spirit. She wears her hair in uncontrolled curls and short skirts over trousers, in a daring challenge of the conventional Victorian dress code. Oscar, meanwhile, looks like he just rolled out of bed. His “togs” (clothes) are tattered, since he keeps no money for himself beyond what he needs to pay his rent. He is scrupulous in his moral code; Lucinda isn’t above deceit.

Alas, they don’t wind up together, when a tragic turn of events takes the life of one of them, in a way that is both beautiful and awful. It parallels the ‘trap’ they made for themselves through a lack of communication (had they admitted their feelings for each other, one would never have taken a journey that ended terribly) and by the wager that costs a life. There are consequences to living as ‘recklessly’ as these two people, who stake their lives on the outcome of a bet.

The movie is hard to watch, not just because of the ending, but because of the lost innocence each encounters along the way. They are idealistic, and butt up against the harshness of a cruel world and its realities. Sweet, delicate Oscar witnesses terrible atrocities he cannot stop, and commits one to protect himself. Lucinda’s fear of allowing people to get too close to her makes her admit she cannot let anyone be just a “simple, good chap. I criticize too much.”

The story also revolves around faith, and the lack thereof or how it shapes people’s lives, since her reverend friend is sent away by the Church to “preach things you do not believe, to people who will not care,” for associating with Lucinda. Oscar grapples with his faith, his desire to be above moral reproach, and in a sad way, that is what condemns one of them to death. In the very way they feared all along, no less. It’s a sadistic twist, and I wish the story could end any other way.

I wanted them to have their happy ending. To come together and be strange together. To battle their addictions together, to run the glassworks together, to have a cute romance without a tragedy… but alas. Loss makes their relationship bittersweet, because it contains echoes of what “could have been…” had Fate been kinder.

Written for The Unhappy Valentines Blog-A-Thon.

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.