Tag: New Zealand

“The Piano,” directed by Jane Campion

piano

Loose Talk

by Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill

Polly Frost: I can’t imagine anyone taking “The Piano” seriously, but I thought that as a silly movie it was on a level with “Beaches.” Holly Hunter plays Keith Jarrett-style music even though the film is set in the Victorian era. You get to see Harvey Keitel naked, sensitive, and in Maori makeup. He’s not the Bad Lieutenant anymore! Although I’m not sure I want the hero of my romantic fantasy to have feelings.

Ray Sawhill: Did you love it when, naked in the half-light, he caresses her piano because she’s not there?

PF: Of course. And I especially liked the idea of a guy working his way up under my hoop skirts to give me a lick.

RS: It’s an enduring feminist issue: the virtuous man eats pussy and likes it.

PF: I’m all for that. And when Harvey finally fucks her it’s important that it’s not from behind. They’re face to face, and he looks deep into her eyes … But not in that tedious way men have of trying to figure out whether you’ve come or not.

RS: I’m a big fan of the frontier movie where all the work you ever see being done is the occasional closeup of a log being split. And I did enjoy the way the Maoris sat around all day and communed with nature, taking breaks only to disparage Sam Neill’s manliness.

PF: In the movie, Maoris exist as nothing but elemental beings — they’re sort of like the mud. For all her feminist/deconstructionist airs, Jane Campion doesn’t have the most progressive view of “the other.” But mother and daughter communicating in sign language, being a woman corseted and then set free — I eat that stuff like candy.

RS: It’s really a self-conscious, upscale version of “Clan of the Cave Bear.” Holly Hunter is a member of a superior species, i.e., a modern woman. So she takes no part whatsoever in making a life on the frontier. She just goes around acting passionate, furious, and indignant.

PF: It’s pure supermarket Gothic, with an “I’m in charge” attitude. Men oppress women’s sexuality because they can’t deal with it. Women are the more sexual, and men chained women up, and now finally in the Nineties men are awakening to their place as secondary to women. Alright!

RS: What do you make of the fact that liberation is seen as marriage to a macho, sensitive guy?

PF: It’s as key in these new radical/retro fantasies as it was in the originals not to want to cheat on your husband. He has to drive you to it. Here, everything conspires to make her have an affair. Bliss.

RS: The movie seems to be like catnip for post-feminists. Harvey blackmails Holly in such a perfect “I’m so sorry I’m ravishing you, but I can’t help myself” kind of way. Women keep telling me they find the film quite haunting.

PF: Some of the imagery does have that “Seventh Seal” quality. Although any time you have people in dark clothes wandering around for no reason on a wild beach I guess it’s haunting.

RS: The piano, Holly’s feelings, and the sea, our great mother.

PF: But how do you actually feel about the film? Stop shifting in your chair so uncomfortably.

RS: I guess I find it frightening.

PF: Maybe the fantasy gets to you more than you want to admit.

RS: What I really find scary is how seriously women can take their fantasies. The Holly Hunter character is a Nineties woman-with-a-grievance dropped into an era that’s truly repressive. She’s mute because the world is so unjust — isn’t that what the bad hair-do and the bonnet and the angry slit of a mouth are about? At least a conventional romance would give us a panting beauty popping out of her bodice. The women who love the movie seem to want to believe that their desire for a romantic movie represents a threat to the status quo and that their sexual pleasure represents a political triumph. Guy fantasies are more often presented as cartoons you’re not meant to take seriously.

PF: Clint Eastwood really lets you take his recent movies lightly.

RS: But isn’t it true that many educated women like their romantic fantasies to be presented with a solemn, high-art aura? That’s what I find so terrifying.

PF: Campion is like Margaret Atwood and Naomi Wolf. They have temper tantrums over their right to enjoy the most routine female fantasies.

RS: Though there’s no avoiding the fact that Campion knows how to make an eccentric, threatening image. One after another, in fact, with no flow between them.

PF: These women feel guilty about their fantasies. Just have the fantasies!

RS: Campion is such a bad director of actors. Holly Hunter seems to have decided that her character’s muteness means that she should never change her facial expression.

PF: Sam Neill is a wonderful actor, but the film emasculates him. He’s even called “dry balls” by the Maori at the very start of the film.

RS: And what is it about feminists and the Victorian age?

PF: Basically what it is is that women who like these movies go around in Laura Ashley dresses.

RS: Holly’s muteness, her hands reaching into that box to finger the keyboard, the nailed-up windows and doors — it’s all that tediousness about being “denied a voice.”

PF: It’s OK, you can calm down — the movie’s over. The honest film about women, sex and imprisonment is “Mrs. Soffel.” Gillian Armstrong just films what she wants to film as a woman. She doesn’t justify it at all.

RS: Maybe that’s why Armstrong’s “The Last Days of Chez Nous” is even scarier than “The Piano.” What is it that makes Campion such a perfect subject for journalists? I’ve never seen a single pan of any of her movies.

PF: It’s the whole Spike Lee thing — she writes out their copy for them. Campion plays at inspiration but she never allows it to take her over. Ray?

RS: Yeah?

PF: You’d look good in Maori makeup.

©1993 by Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“Smash Palace,” directed by Roger Donaldson

smash palace

Glass Houses

By Ray Sawhill

The only films from New Zealand to receive a major American release in recent years are “Sleeping Dogs” and “Smash Palace,” both directed by Roger Donaldson. “Smash Palace” is about how a husband and wife jockey for position when their marriage goes flat, and it has a beautiful clarity and a plain-spoken elegance. Al Shaw (Bruno Lawrence) has brought Jacqui (Anna Jemison), whom he met and married in Europe, to the New Zealand boondocks. There, tinkering in an auto junkyard, building and racing a sophisticated car, teaching their daughter, Georgie (Greer Robson), how to use tools, and chuckling over snooker and beer with his friend Ray (Keith Aberdein), Al is content. But the chic Jacqui has grown bored. She wants a chance to feel pretty and saucy again; she begins an affair with Ray, takes the child and moves out. Al sputters impotently until, humiliated by a friend of Ray’s, he decides he must have Georgie all to himself, if only for a while, and he hatches a desperate, nutty plot.

The story may sound grim, but Donaldson, who also co-wrote the screenplay (with Peter Hansard and Bruno Lawrence), tells it with unaffected wit. The film is congenial and funny, and it takes you farther than you expect. The warm, powdered light, the authenticity of the details and the patient rhythms bring you in close to Al and Jacqui; the action unwinds out of their deepest yearnings as if that were the most natural way in the world to tell a story. The principal actors let you look right into them: Bruno Lawrence and Anna Jemison keep Al and Jacqui’s inner fires burning ferociously, and little Greer Robson shows you the strength of Georgie’s emotional life.

“Smash Palace” was made on New Zealand’s North Island, a setting that seems both familiar and eerie. Not far from little wood houses, tall grasses and rolling hills that resemble down-home America are a rain forest and a fog-collared mountain — beyond the everyday slumbers something more essential. One long sequence cuts between Georgie, sucking her thumb and clicking a flashlight on and off, as if trying to hypnotize herself into numbness, and, in another room, her quarreling parents. Al and Jacqui trade accusations, scream at each other and come to blows. As Jacqui sobs, Al pulls her clothes off and makes love to her, brutally and despairingly. They lie back against the green and red quilt, and Jacqui, her flushed face streaked with tears and sweat, tells Al she’s leaving him. It’s a daring domestic scene, breathtakingly sustained. Roger Donaldson has made a film that has the surprises, the calm and the inevitability of a classic fable.

©1982 by Newsweek Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“Young Guns II,” directed by Geoff Murphy

young guns II cast

By Ray Sawhill

“Young Guns II” isn’t to be confused with the original “Young Guns,” a mixture of fake cowboy style and celebrity worship. The new picture, the first directed in America by the New Zealander Geoff Murphy, may have more glamorizing flourishes than it needs, but it also has obstreperousness and fervor. Within the limits of the commercial Western, it’s a stunning piece of filmmaking.

The movie takes another look at the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In this version, Billy’s ego is swelling even as his fortunes wane; he has begun to believe in his legend. But the big landowners want to crush Billy and his gang. They hire Billy’s old comrade in arms Pat Garrett (William Petersen) to track him down.

The actors — including Emilio Estevez, Lou Diamond Phillips and Kiefer Sutherland from the original film’s cast — bring wit and gravity to their roles. John Fusco’s script conveys something of the historical Billy — a small man who was a charismatic sociopath.

But it’s the director’s work that puts the movie across. Murphy refreshes the Western by channeling back into it the intensity that filmmakers set loose in the ’60s and ’70s. Played out against vast, totemic landscapes, “Young Guns II” is the first Western in years to have the ritualistic quality of the classics of the genre. (It isn’t a surprise to learn that Murphy’s wife is a Maori.)

geoff murphy

A former trumpet player who spent years touring with a rock band, Murphy, now 51, has a musician’s love of irreverence and shifts in tempo and mood. It wasn’t until 1980 that he made his first feature film, “Goodbye Pork Pie,” a lickety-split road movie that was as popular in New Zealand as “E.T.” His second film, “Utu,” about colonial rule in New Zealand, was a great hip epic. (It’s available on videocassette.) In it, Murphy fused elements of costume drama, Westerns, and samurai films: “In New Zealand we borrow genres and try to put our experience into them, and hope our own genres will develop over time.”

“Geoff’s a real mad-conductor type,” Fusco says. “He’d stay up all night working out the next day’s shooting in detailed computer drawings and plans, pass them out, then fall asleep until the assistant director would tell him it was time to roll. Then he’d shake himself, throw himself into the work and make it look effortless.”

Murphy says he’s still suffering from culture shock. “In New Zealand the movies are something you might go to on Saturday night. Here, the average 15-year-old has seen every movie. I’ve never experienced that level of fierceness about films.” A fan of Westerns, he says that “television did a lot of harm. Also, Sergio Leone had an effect. I love his films, but he did to the Western what Einstein did to physics — he finished the book. And he did it with such panache that he dehumanized it. If the Western wants to revive, it has to give the audience a chance to feel something.”

©1990 by Newsweek Inc. Reproduced by permission.

“Monday’s Warriors” by Maurice Shadbolt

shadbolt

By Ray Sawhill

The action in “Monday’s Warriors” (Godine), Maurice Shadbolt’s new novel, has a roughriding excitement, and the language is sharp — there are no ominous premonitions or nameless dreads. This crackling Conradian adventure yarn is based on a true story. Kimball Bent, an American conscript in the British Army in New Zealand, deserts, and talks the Maori who find him into sparing his life. It’s the late 1800s, and the British have mounted a military campaign to wipe out what remains of Maori resistance. Bent gradually realizes that he hasn’t entered an inchoate, savage world — he’s entered a culture in disarray. The Maori are at odds with each other over how to deal with the whites.

When the English, determined to teach the Maori a lesson, crush one of their peaceful villages, Titoko, the village elder, who has been a spokesman for peace, consults the ancient war gods and talks several tribes into reinstating the old customs and going on the attack. The body of the novel concerns this war, one of the last Maori uprisings against their invaders. As Titoko wins battles, more and more Maori join up, and he grows close to Bent, whose realistic yet detached viewpoint he values. The Maori use the Anglos’ fearfulness against them; essentially, Titoko suckers the English into defeating themselves.

Is Titoko having a lucky streak, or has he really summoned the ancestral magic? Or is he just futilely acting out what history demands? Bent, the American, provides the reader with an opening onto a world of Maori ambivalence. Whipped and out-smarted, the settlers demonize Bent, convinced the Maori couldn’t outfight and outthink Her Majesty’s troops without some kind of Caucasian help.

Maurice Shadbolt is almost entirely unknown in America, although he has written over a dozen books. “Monday’s Warriors” is his first to be published in this country since the defiant, supercharged 1987 “Season of the Jew,” one of the least-noticed, least-discussed major novels in recent years; still available in paperback, it, too, concerns the Army and the Maori in the 19th century. The two novels are each complete, self-contained works, yet are also fine companion pieces.

They’re also very funny. Is there something about the Maori — their mocking humor and ferocity, perhaps, and their apparent invulnerability to sentimentality — that leads to treatment of their tragedy as black comedy? In both of these daring epics, the conversations and faceoffs have the rapidfire wit and formality of a high level karate match — and Shadbolt never tries to glamorize his terseness or style. The scenes of slaughter, and the evocation of the New Zealand landscape, have an Elizabethan unruliness and splendor; the author suggests a mystical component without dragging the stories down. If we’re drawn to marvel at the senseless trouble people cause themselves and each other, Shadbolt leaves us on our own to do it. He sets us down in the mistrust and beauty and keeps the dramatic tension keyed way up. Readers may feel that at its best Shadbolt’s work outdoes Hemingway.

© 1992 by Ray Sawhill.