Australian film critics often claim that one new film or another marks the coming of age of the Australian film industry. In the 1980s, Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) achieved this by telling the story of the Allies' World War I invasion of Turkey from an Australian perspective. In the 1990s, the term was no longer applied to nationalist narratives but to ‘outward-looking’ genre films, such as the thriller Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) and the musical Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), as discussed in Chapter 2. In addition, each era of the Australian cinema has its share of coming-of-age narratives. In a reappraisal of the genre, Raffaele Caputo argues that the coming-of-age film serves as a ‘mirror’ of the nation's development. Stories of personal maturity are often set against the background of a major turning point in a nation's past: the Vietnam War in American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), World War II in Summer of 42 (Robert Mulligan, 1971) and Racing the Moon (Richard Benjamin, 1984). The subgenre routinely uses first-person narration – an adult looking back at a key turning point in his or her adolescence, a socialising moment in which he or she crosses the threshold into the world of adulthood. As Caputo and others have argued, this characteristic nostalgic view leads to a depiction of the past as a more innocent and secure place than the present, even when set against a background of large-scale historical turning points.