Film

Rip It Up, Issue 100, 1 November 1985, Page 8

Film

William Dart

KINGPIN Director: Mike Walker The subject of Kingpin alienated Maori youth tethered in a state reform institution is a provocative one and a very real issue in present-day New Zealand society. The opening sequence of the movie, with each boy’s life history snapped out impersonally on a computer read-out against a frozen-frame image of the character, promises a film that might have just the punch to handle its Subject. From the first lines of dialogue, alas, it becomes clear that the film isn’t going to live up to these initial promises. The ingenuous charm of Junior Amigo’s Willie Hoto palls very quickly and Nicholas Rogers’ Karl is an equally charmless villain, not helped by the actor’s lumbering performance. The central character is Mitchell Manuel's Riki, whose reluctance to get involved proves almost as fatal as Hamlet’s procrastinations. The European characters show the same crude polarity with Judy Mclntosh and Peter McCauley as the longsuffering social workers and Terence Cooper as the unsympathetic Director of the institution.

Kingpin throws out some intriguing ideas the idea of a reform school as a microcosm of the larger social group is one although the film stays well clear of any real analysis of the Maori-Pakeha conflict that lies, unspoken, beneath the surface. For a few minutes in Kingpin we are introduced to Riki’s alcoholic father (movingly played by Wi Kuki Kaa, one of the more distinguished actors in Utu): it may only be a cameo but one feels that this character, investigated more fully and integrated within the script, could have brought up some even more provocative issues.

BABY IT’S YOU Director: John Sayles Sayles has an unfortunate track record with his film releases in this country. Somewhere in the Halls of Distribution someone obviously considers the American director “arthouse" material and his films seem to be relegated to the annual festival circuit as happened last year with the magnificent Lianna. His 1982 movie, Baby It’s You previewed as a festival release and has now made it to more general audiences.

Set against a soundtrack of songs of period (everything from the Toys’ ‘Concerto Of Love’ through to the Velvet Underground's ‘Venus In Furs’) we’re plunged back into the mid-60s to experience a wry, bittersweet romance between a nice clean-cut college girl (played by Rosanna Arquette) and a distictly slick young Italian man (Vincent Spano). Although the film registers as rather episodic and many might find its basic premise too contrived for an overdeveloped sense of reality, Sayles has crafted Baby It's You with considerable style and, where required, force. The constant backdrop of period pop songs provides commentary on the screen action the couple's final dance to Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers In the Night' may come across as sentimental, but it is tempered by a certain edge, a distancing. We’ve seen a lot of spivvy young Italian lads on screen lately, from Nicholas Cage in Birdy to Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club : Vincent Spano’s "Sheik" may well be the prototype. Spano comes up with a beautifully shaded performance, the brusque and insensitive aspects of the character contrasting sharply with his touching pursuit of Arquette or that eerie scene with him in a tacky Florida

bar entertaining retired couples by miming to Frank Sinatra records. Now the million dollar question is ... when are we going to see Sayles’ most recent film, the quirky Brother from Another Planet ?

SYLVIA Director: Michael Firth . It’s Sylvia Ashton-Warner herself who opens Michael Firth’s film a 1974 interview with the author, showing her as lively as one remembers: slightly querulous yet not slow to come out with a wellaimed incisive comment. After these few minutes, the remainder of Sylvia seems remarkably low key, tame even. " It’s easy to understand why Firth’s film has made the impact that it has in the States, with lan Paul’s lyrical photography of the New Zealand country districts complemented by Leonard Rosenman’s rather pretty score, his unaffected piano writing echoing Sylvia’s own piano playing at various points in the film. And it’s certainly a far cry from the Hollywood version of Spinster which set Shirley MacLaine the task of portraying Ashton-Warner. Covering nine years of real time within a film, Sylvia concentrates on Ashton-Warner’s revolutionary ideas on teaching Maori children. Yet, to me anyway, these didn’t convince: perhaps it was the essential naivety of having a class of smiling youngsters singing the alphabet to 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ or perhaps it was the forced performances of the children themselves, who did not seem completely at ease. On the European side, the cast is rather top-heavy with British actors. Eleanor David’s Sylvia presents an intelligent and convincing portrait of Ashton-Warner. and Nigel Terry is a smooth Lothario of a school inspector (a tentative extra-marital relationship that is never really developed in the film) although Tom Wilkinson as Sylvia husband is rather less interesting.

It is Mary Regan’s Opal, the philosophical district nurse who befriends Sylvia, who brings the ring of truth to the proceedings. Altogether less convincing in Firth’s last film, The Heart of the Stag, Regan catches the personality of the character and the period to perfection. Perhaps Opal’s is the unspoken story behind the better-known tale of Sylvia Ashton-Warner.