Friday new releases: 3 May 2024

Once again, lim­ited ses­sion times con­spire against me get­ting to everything. I am told by a col­league that miss­ing out on the ultra-violent Boy Kills World means I am the only one involved in that film who actu­ally dodged a bullet.

The mar­ket­ing around the new Aotearoa bleak-comedy The Moon Is Upside Down is off-putting and the film is cer­tainly not going to be to everyone’s tastes, but I hope it finds an audience.

I’m sure it will over­seas because the sens­ib­il­ity of writer-director Loren Taylor’s work is very European. I saw someone men­tion Kaurismäki as a touch­stone and that’s a smart obser­va­tion – dead­pan com­edy with an under­tone of sad­ness, loneli­ness and missed connections.

The film is about three women from very dif­fer­ent back­grounds whose stor­ies inter­sect – you wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘col­lide’ – in the grim empti­ness of the cent­ral North Island.

Natalia (Victoria Haralabidou) is a Siberian mail order bride off to start a new life in (did I hear someone say?) Mangaweka. Faith (Elizabeth Hawthorn) is an empty-nester liv­ing in a plush inner city apart­ment, dis­trac­tedly inspect­ing invest­ment flats bought by her hus­band before he headed off over­seas. And Taylor her­self plays Briar (great name for someone who is a little bit prickly). She’s an anaes­thet­ist in an online rela­tion­ship with Tim (Robbie Magasiva).

Natalia soon finds out that Mac’s gar­age and ser­vice sta­tion, and indeed Mac him­self (Jemaine Clement), is not what it is cracked up to be. She was prom­ised a café to man­age but it’s just a gar­age full of junk. And Mac’s sis­ter, Hilary (Robyn Malcolm), seems to be alto­geth­er too involved in the whole business.

One of Faith’s inspec­tions reveals the deteri­or­at­ing corpse of a ten­ant with no fam­ily or friends, so she takes it upon her­self to try and send them off with some dignity.

Meanwhile, Briar’s attempt to have a romantic week­end away with Tim go from bad to worse as unex­pec­ted men­stru­ation, travel sick­ness and roadkill con­spire to get in their way.

Refreshingly frank about sexu­al mat­ters – at least com­pared with most New Zealand films – The Moon Is Upside Down also has a great eye for our often ter­rible domest­ic interi­or dec­or­a­tion and our sand­pa­per approach to relationships. 

I’ve seen the film described in a couple of places as star-studded but that’s just a way to describe the fact that the film is full of the same old faces from the Kiwi rep­er­tory company.

I was going to com­plain about that – can’t we find any­one new? – but it turns out that they are all play­ing sat­is­fact­or­ily against type, or at least just enough against type for it to feel fresh. Magasiva used to be a hunky lead­ing man – and may well be again – but here he is the oppos­ite of alpha. Rachel House amus­ingly down­plays her brief role and Ginette McDonald steals her scene simply by being present.

For once, we can sense a New Zealand dir­ect­or ask­ing for less and get­ting more as a result.

After a night at the theatre once my com­pan­ion asked, where would writers be without birds in cages? There’s one in The Moon Is Upside Down and a canary makes a reg­u­lar appear­ance in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s bio­graphy of Amy Winehouse, Back To Black.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

That’s a sign of how obvi­ous most of the script is. (Matt Greenhalgh has bet­ter form with the Ian Curtis biop­ic Control and anoth­er Taylor-Johnson col­lab­or­a­tion, Nowhere Boy about John Lennon.)

Where the film shines, then, is the per­form­ances. Eddie Marsan is quietly heart­break­ing as Winehouse’s taxi driver fath­er, clearly out of his depth in the worlds of both show busi­ness and addic­tion. Jack O’Connell gets right under the tat­tooed skin of hus­band and ena­bler Blake Fielder-Civil. And Marisa Abela is remark­able as Amy, doing almost all her own singing, to the extent that I felt sure the inspir­a­tion for the film was: “Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be Amy Winehouse!”

But that’s not cor­rect. This is the second film this year to fic­tion­al­ise an Island Records artist with the approv­al of their fam­ily, so it seems more likely that giv­ing a sig­nal boost to the back cata­logue is the main motivation.

It’s icon­ic Jewish female week at Funerals & Snakes, as Helen Mirren inhab­its the role of Israeli prime min­is­ter Golda Meir.

This would be a chal­len­ging film to write about at the best of times but the choice to release it now feels some­what poin­ted. Following Meir dur­ing the month-long Yom Kippur War of September 1973 – a war that took Israel by sur­prise and for a brief peri­od threatened the exist­ence of the state – the film is frus­trat­ingly limited.

There is vir­tu­ally no his­tor­ic­al con­text for either her ascend­ence to the premi­er­ship or the back­ground to the war. The film simply moves from cab­in­et room, to war room, to Meir’s apart­ment and back again, with no sense of per­spect­ive out­side of the Israeli government.

It’s sloppy, too. There are long sequences of Meir listen­ing stoic­ally to the destruc­tion of her troops in their tanks – ill-advised by her gen­er­als until some­how they turn the tide – she writes the cas­u­alty num­bers in pen­cil in a note­book and dur­ing the enquiry she says she remem­bers every single one, except that she cites a ridicu­lously off-the-cuff round num­ber to demon­strate how much she cared.

We are asked to admire how tough she was – bul­ly­ing the gen­o­cid­al Henry Kissinger who is giv­en a very indul­gent por­tray­al by Liev Schreiber – and the film gives her cred­it for ulti­mately win­ning peace with Egypt, des­pite the fact that she was pre­pared to sac­ri­fice 30,000 Egyptian sol­diers, encircled with no food or water, in order to win her con­ces­sions,. They were host­ages, effectively.

And that appears to be the untimely mes­sage of the film. That peace can only be achieved through the threat of over­whelm­ing force. And by present­ing no altern­at­ive to that view, the film is depress­ingly one-eyed I am afraid.