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By Harvey Clark
At the movies with Harvey Clark -
International Film Festival
Of the 58 films shown at the 17th Auckland International
Film Festival, only one sparked a response from the audience
which was general and sustained. It was a commercial
New Zealand film, Mr Wrong.
Not since Goodbye Pork Pie
has an audience responded with such delight. They screamed,
they roared, they applauded,
they left their seats reluctantly and they chatted
happily all the way home.
Such a response is usually sparked
only by a mass appeal film. The fact that it was a
parochial New Zealand
audience probably had a lot to do with it.
But there
is no doubting that Mr Wrong, a comedy-thriller, was
the most popular film of the festival. It generated
the elusive spark between screen and audience that
directors strive for.
Why? Probably because audiences
not only love to be frightened, but they love to laugh
at their
own fright.
They appreciate
being hoodwinked by a clever director.
Director
Gaylene Preston, a timid-looking little bookworm-in-jeans
with big glasses, makes her
feature debut with Mr Wrong.
It is a commercial
thriller which cleverly pokes fun at its own genre
and, under its comic veneer,
sends
up the inherent male sexism of New Zealand society.
Mr
Wrong, sold for US distribution this week and scheduled
for general release in Auckland
in October,
stars Heather
Bolton and David Letch as paranoid victim and
murderous wretch.
Well done, Preston.
The festival was notable for its
excellent organisation (no bad bottlenecks as patrons
poured in, thanks
to the Civic’s layout), for its absence
of political and feminist heavyweights, and
for its expression of variations
in black humour, a world trend on both the
festival and commercial circuits.
Directors
with something to say about a morbid subject
(oppression for example), are using
humour as a medium
to convey their message.
The contrast gives
such a film more poignancy, more impact and often more
realism rather than
soaking
its audience
in traditional human misery. Life, after
all, is a tragicomedy.
The Family Game was very funny
but under the surface it criticised clinical, stifling
suburbia.
Mr Wrong
revelled in comic thrills but underneath
it had a lot to say about
dominating male attitudes. American independent
Jim Jarmusch’s
deadpan Stranger Than Paradise was hilarious
but his characters who made us laugh were,
in reality, horrifying
dehumanised flotsam drifting like dead leaves
in a world devoid of values.
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