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By Costa Botes
AFTER the no-show of New Zealand features
at last year’s festival, locally made movies were
back with a vengeance.
Finance might be tight as ever,
but any industry that can encompass the extremes of
achievement seen in Bread and Roses and Desperate Remedies
has to
be in reasonable shape. Artistically and technically,
both films were world class.
Desperate Remedies is a
debut feature from the directing team of Peter Wells
and Stewart Main. The benefit of
their long filmmaking apprenticeship is everywhere
apparent in the impudent assurance with which this
startling,
voluptuous work is crafted.
By attacking our prevailing
notions of realism on a wide front, this overpowering
southseas melodrama succeeds
both as a provocative art-political statement, and
as witty, sensual entertainment.
By contrast, Bread And
Roses, Gaylene Preston’s
adaptation of the autobiography by Sonja Davies,
has its stylistic feet planted firmly on the ground.
But
there’s poetry in the ordinary everyday,
and Preston finds it.
Warm, generous, and moving to
a fault, this superbly
mounted evocation of a life and an era slips through
its epic length without a hint of a stumble.
The enthusiastic
response by the local audience owes much to the film’s
dramatic strength, but much also to the welcome shocks
of recognition with which
we are able to greet all the vital cultural details
imbedded in the narrative.
I can only take up the common
cry. Why don’t we
get more local drama like this?
Commercial imperatives
may always rule the roost – we
are, after all, a materialist economy founded as
an exploitative colony – but the best reasons
for having a homegrown film industry are all cultural.
As
we move towards our third century, we have yet to fully
debate, let alone resolve, the question
of our
national identity.
Cinema, produced by visionaries
and storytellers gifted as those highlighted here,
is a vital further
step
along that road. It also gives the rest of the
world a window
into our soul, putting a human face to an otherwise
obscure, and perhaps highly dispensable blip
on the edge of the
map.
Do take the opportunity then of seeing
Bread and Roses in one piece, on the big screen. Many
people
did that
during this year’s Film Festival and were
won over by the story’s mix of nostalgia,
politics, and engaging dramatic writing.
The scale of the achievement cannot be discounted.
Preston and her collaborators have effectively
put together the
equivalent of two feature films.
Logistically this
is no mean feat.
That the finished result happens
to be utterly confident, moving, and memorable is downright
miraculous.
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