Monday new releases: 26 August 2024

Welcome to this week’s “women fight­ing back against their abusers” triple-feature. These are all inter­est­ing films but it has been pretty drain­ing watch­ing them all in one week.

When I reviewed Taika Waititi’s Boy back in 2010 I said some­thing like, it’s either the sad­dest com­edy I’ve ever seen or the fun­ni­est tragedy. When you walk that fine line and audi­ences can’t tell which is which, then you have man­aged to do both things well.

Waititi went on to co-found the pro­duc­tion com­pany Piki Films and his movies The Hunt for The Wilderpeople and Jojo Rabbit were pro­duced there, as well as The Breaker Upperers (Sami/van Beek) and The Mountain (House).

The Piki house style draws a lot on Waititi’s own pre­ferred com­bin­a­tion of social com­ment and anarch­ic humour. Wilderpeople was a wacky com­edy about a trau­mat­ised young boy who watches his foster mum die; Jojo Rabbit was a wacky com­edy about Hitler and the Holocaust; Breaker Upperers was a wacky com­edy on the theme of heart­break and The Mountain was a wacky com­edy about a teen­ager who dies of cancer. 

And now, arriv­ing with­in weeks of the hor­rif­ic and tra­gic report of the Royal Commission on Abuse in State and Church Care, we have We Were Dangerous, a film about female empower­ment set in a 1950s New Zealand reform school for teen­age girls.

It’s a com­edy ver­sion of one of those insti­tu­tions, giv­en a com­edy name – Te Motu School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls. In the open­ing sequence, it might as well be St. Trinian’s as Nellie (Erana James) and Daisy (Manaia Hall) have their escape plans foiled by mean old mat­ron (Rima Te Wiata). Because of this fail­ure of dis­cip­line, every­one is packed off to a tiny island in Lyttelton Harbour that was once a home for interned pris­on­ers of war and (pos­sible) lepers.

While We Were Dangerous tells an empower­ing story of female friend­ship and over­com­ing social injustice, it does so using the back­drop of the very real trauma and crim­in­al abuse that occurred in those places. Classmates are mutil­ated in a make­shift sick­bay to meet the demands of the pat­ri­arch­al New Zealand author­it­ies but those girls aren’t giv­en real char­ac­ter­isa­tions (or motiv­a­tion­al flash­backs) like Nellie and Daisy. They are just motiv­a­tion­al flot­sam float­ing around in the back­ground, like so many oth­er examples of the real-world treat­ment girls like that would have exper­i­enced. They are alluded to – there­fore acknow­ledged – but not atten­ded to.

The film wants to be an uplift­ing story of fem­in­ist empower­ment but because it doesn’t take the ser­i­ous stuff ser­i­ously enough, it ends up as a romantic fantasy rather than being fully rounded.

I’m curi­ous, too, about the title. It sug­gests that the story is being told from the point of view of the ‘dan­ger­ous’ girls, look­ing back on how they were per­ceived by the state, but the nar­ra­tion is by Te Wiata’s Matron – from a much more sym­path­et­ic view­point than she her char­ac­ter has in the film itself. Is the film sug­gest­ing that it was us – New Zealand – that are the “we” in We Were Dangerous? That would be interesting.

Watching Zoë Kravitz’ horror-thriller Blink Twice, I was reminded that in 1987 her moth­er, Lisa Bonet, starred in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart which tra­versed some sim­il­ar them­at­ic ter­rit­ory. That film also fea­tured a char­ac­ter being tor­men­ted by slowly return­ing sup­pressed trau­mat­ic memor­ies. As I recall, it also had a few chickens.

Reformed bad boy tech bil­lion­aire Slater King (Channing Tatum, very suc­cess­fully play­ing against type) invites two broke flat­mates (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat) to join him and his rich and power­ful friends at a party on his private island. There, they are wel­comed into a world seem­ingly without con­sequences and where black­ing out after a night of excess doesn’t seem that unusual.

But when they real­ise that all of the women at the party were pro­cured in the same, seem­ingly ran­dom, way and that they don’t all come from the same priv­ileged back­ground as the men, things start to feel some­what com­prom­ised and the con­fis­ca­tion of their phones on arrival was clearly not a con­tri­bu­tion to their free­dom to party.

It turns out that the sense of enti­tle­ment for these men – who include Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Kyle MacLachlan and Haley Joel Osment – goes a lot fur­ther than just expens­ive drugs, good food and fine wine.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The script by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum is full – per­haps over-full – of care­fully cur­ated meta­phors and allu­sions and has plenty of sat­is­fact­ory call-backs and twists. It’s archi­tec­tur­ally sound, as is Kravitz’ dir­ec­tion. I enjoyed it a lot, even though I was forced to grim­ace more than I am usu­ally com­fort­able with.

It’s inter­est­ing – and prob­ably anoth­er aspect of Kravitz’ argu­ment – that when these entitled rich boys get the abil­ity to have com­plete free­dom over women, what they do with that free­dom is so banal. 

New Zealand audi­ences will watch Isabelle Huppert in The Sitting Duck (aka La syn­dic­al­iste) and won­der if they are watch­ing science-fiction. So many aspects of the French polit­ic­al and busi­ness cul­ture that it shows us are simply incon­ceiv­able in a loc­al context.

Firstly, it assumes that nuc­le­ar power is not only a real, desir­able and polit­ic­ally import­ant thing – so polit­ic­ally import­ant in fact that the biggest nuc­le­ar com­pany in France would be major­ity state owned and that the pres­id­ent could hire and fire the chief exec­ut­ive – and that not only are work­ers rep­res­en­ted at the highest levels of man­age­ment but that their rep­res­ent­at­ive has the ear of gov­ern­ment ministers.

But it is a true story. This is how things work in big­ger coun­tries than ours. Huppert plays Maureen Kearney, the work­er rep at Areva in 2010. Caught in a power struggle after her boss (Marina Foïs) is ous­ted she is told about a secret deal to sell French nuc­le­ar tech­no­logy to the Chinese in exchange for access to key contracts.

When she blows the whistle, she is imme­di­ately demon­ised by the pat­ri­arch­al estab­lish­ment which goes all out to ensure that she can not be taken ser­i­ously. Eventually she is even attacked and viol­ated in her own home. Even then, the powers-that-be are determ­ined to des­troy her repu­ta­tion, weapon­ising her his­tory of alco­hol­ism, depres­sion and workaholism.

The ten­sion in this film res­ults from the ques­tions that are asked about her reli­ab­il­ity and Huppert’s long­stand­ing abil­ity to hold and play two con­tra­dict­ory thoughts at the same time are key to it. You start out by think­ing this is a drama about cap­it­al­ist intrigues and cor­por­ate double-crossing but it ends up being about much more.