Film

Rip It Up, Issue 218, 1 October 1995, Page 40

Film

Five for Five: Culture Clash New Zealand short films are hot property these days and, in the wake of their international success, the New Zealand Film Commission are now marketing them back home with an eye to an audience beyond the film festivals. There are two attractive video compilations on the market, and now five new films are playing the theatrical circuit as part of the Commission’s new Five for Five programme. The five films in Culture Clash all address the theme in question with varying success. I was expecting more of Lisa Reihana’s Maori Dragon Story/He Korero Mo Te Taniwha. The puppets are splendid but, apart from one marvellous moment when the hero’s shell, eyes spin 1 with passion, unimaginatively used. Although there are lovely moments when Reihana explores an interface with graphic art, or when a human limb intrudes on the action, this dragon tale drags somewhat.

Annelise Patterson's Black Bitch and Poata Eruera’s Mananui both suffer from that embarrassing ‘non-acting’ that’s plagued New Zealand film since Rudall Hayward’s early efforts. Black Bitch, I found inconsequential; Mananui, simply crude in its depiction of racial tension in a small New Zealand community. The stand outs were Stewart Main’s Twilight of the Gods and Christine Parker’s Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk. Main’s film, rapturously shot by Simon Raby in black and white, is an erotic fable with a cutting edge in more ways that one. In colonial times, a British soldier and a Maori warrior

are thrown together with unexpected results. Greg Mayor’s skittish Maori warrior is kapai kamp, and the bilingual subtitling is a hoot. Yet, for all its outrageousness, Twilight has an elegiac beauty, with poetic insight and images of extraordinary tenderness. Parker’s filming of Keri Hulme’s Hinekaro comes complete with nifty animation, impressive effects and a full orchestral score composed by Peter Scholes. Indeed, it was such a temptation just to sit back and enjoy Rima Te Wiata (on screen as the bewildered writer) and Rena Owen (off screen as the sly Hinekaro) banter about everything from haute cuisine, humiliation by turd and phallic obelisks. Although it was pretty clear that many of its barbs -were aimed at Pakeha patriarchy, Hinekaro possibly dazzles more than it enlightens; but if you’ve got style, you can get away with this in the magical medium that is cinema. WILLIAM DART

DESPERADO Director: Robert Rodriguez

One comes away from films like Desperado, realising that they are made by people with an immense fascination for the potential of the cinematic medium. Rodriguez, who burst onto the scene a few years back with El Mariachi, a feature made for a mere fistful of dollars, has shown that energy and imagination are not necessarily incompatible with a fatter budget. I was warned I was in for 'Pulp Fiction south of the Border’, and, in a nutshell, that’s Desperado. Current Latin heart-throb Antonio Banderas is a soulful outlaw. He’s equally adept on guitar and machine gun, sworn to revenge the death of his girlfriend — a mission that leads to some extraordinary revelations. Be warned: the body count is prodigious, and the villains are so mean they stalk the streets with bared teeth. There’s not a slack frame in the whole film (talking of frames, Rodriguez is his own editor and it shows in some of the most effective montage I’ve seen for years), and there are some chucklesome set pieces — Steve Buscemi’s bar monologue about the killer that’s lurking on the horizons, Quentin Tarantino’s water sports tale, and Salma Hayek’s gory bookshop bench operation on the wounded Banderas are just three. “A little money, music by Los Lobos and Antonio Banderas, and we could pull off a good movie,” is what Rodriguez suggested to Columbia Pictures. He wasn’t kidding. WILLIAM DART

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION Director: Fred Schepisi

On the New York stage, John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation was a singular experience, a sparkling comedy of discomfort about a cynical Fifth Avenue set whose lives are impinged upon by a mysterious young con man.

On stage, we in the audience played confidant to the cast, who stepped forward and opened their souls and psyches to us. In the screen version (scripted by Guare) there’s a good deal of intercutting between past and present, which is pretty breathless till you grasp the underlying structure. Yet, despite this, Six Degrees is very much a performer’s film, led by the wonderful Stockard Channing from the original Broadway cast, and including such seasoned players as Donald Sutherland, lan McKellen, Mary Beth Hurt and Bruce Davison. Into their over privileged coterie comes Paul (Will Smith), who prepares a chic pasta meal around their kitchen table, brings home a hustler, offers them roles in Cats, and throws their lives into almost as much turmoil as Terence Stamp did his victims in Pasolini’s Teorema.

When Guare’s ambitions stretch beyond brittle repartee and slick social irony, the film lumbers. A couple of truly dreadful scenes have Sutherland musing on the wonders of second grade painting in a school art room, and Smith appearing as a vision to Channing, pontificating on the limitations of the imagination (a theme which has been subtly underplayed throughout the film suddenly becomes embarrassingly obvious). The final scenes of the movie, in which Channing suddenly finds her conscience, rushes from a dinner party and, sans heels, strides along Fifth Avenue a free woman, is just silly. . But these are quibbles. They don't come much classier and wittier than this in mainstream cinema. - WILLIAM DART JUDGE DREDD Director: Danny Cannon f A few minutes into Judge Dredd, you come to the conclusion that this film barely needs any human component, so spectacular is it vision of New . York (sorry, Mega-City One) in the year

2139 AD. With a vision straddling Metropolis and Blade Runner, Nigel Phelps’ sets provide the movie’s raison d’etre. Comic strip origins makes for pretty basic characterisation, which means Sly Stallone of the granite face and bulging biceps is perfectly cast in the title role. Verbal wit is supplied by the frenetic Rob Schneider as the wisecracking Fergie, perfunctory love interest by Diane Lane as Judge Hershey. Even with such enjoyable hokum as this, and an 80-million dollar budget to toy with, a few opportunities seem to have passed the film makers by. This sleazy soul couldn’t help but think what slimy havoc the half hatched androids could have caused if they’d been used more in the finale of the film. And, taking a lead from Bette Davis, who more than once has done a turn as twin good/evil sisters, Judge Dredd could have been rather more unsettling if Armand Assante’s evil Rico was also played by Stallone. WILLIAM DART MUTE WITNESS Director: Anthony Waller A neat little movie this, with a wicked sense of humour and scant respect for any audiences with a fear of roller-coaster rides. From its teaser of an opening scene, Mute Witness is a virtuoso thriller with enough red herrings to keep the Norwegian shipping industry buoyant for a decade.

The premise is simple enough. Billy, a deafmute member of a film crew, lingers in a Moscow studio after the cast have gone off for the day, only to find herself witness to a reallife snuff movie. The ensuing film concerns her cat-and-mouse game with the villains, or those whom she perceives as the villains. (Being

Russia, one is never sure who is mafioso and who isn’t.) Anthony Waller (like our own Lee Tamahori) comes from the world of television advertising, and he has a lean film making style — everything counts. He plays the cliches with relish — from the noirish music (all sub-Rachmaninov piano and strings) to the obligatory sequence with the heroine taking a bath, draped in a towel in classic Hollywood starlet style. An American production shot in Moscow around the time of the 1993 October Revolution, it has two Western leads (Evan Richards and Fay Ripley), with Russian Marina Sudina memorable as the beleaguered Billy. My favourite? Oleg Jankowskij as the sinister Larsen... unsettlingly reminiscent of a provincial arts administrator I once met in Samara... WILLIAM DART AMATEUR Director: Hal Hartley Hartley’s third feature, a self-styled ‘metaphysical thriller’, makes for 100 rather demanding minutes. True, there’s a little more drive to it than Hartley showed on his previous feature, Simple Men, but Amateur will be a tough nut for the uninitiated. In precis, the plot looks promisingly off beat — with a quartet comprising an ex-nun who's trying to keep body and soul together writing porn novels (Isabelle Huppert) an amnesiac hood (Martin Donovan), a psychotic accountant (Damian Young, in what is by far the liveliest performance of the movie) and a put-upon porn star (Elina Lowensohn, registering as a cross between Louise Brooks and Uma Thurman). For me it’s the over intellectualising that deals Amateur its deathblow. Quentin Tarantino’s scripts are self-conscious, but they

have style and life; Hartley’s words never escape from the page. Quips like: “How can you be a nymphomaniac and have sex? I’m choosy,” end up provoking a smile rather than a laugh, not helped by the low energy acting Hartley obviously favours. In the final convent play out (for a while there I was worried we might be into a rather arcane Sister Act 3) Donovan and Huppert deliver their dialogue, laborious sentence by laborious sentence, with interminable pauses between. Yet elsewhere Hartley fires images of panic and

coercion at you — people are harassed out of cafes and cinemas; Young, in a wonderful, ever-so-human moment, stuffs his face with a purloined pizza. Would that Hartley’s characters showed more such human desires and passions.

Hartley speaks of ‘exploitation’ as one of the themes of his film... of the actors, the technicians, the producers and production staff. Perhaps the audience’s patience could be added to the list.

WILLIAM DART