Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 28 October

The Dark Horse (Napier Robertson, 2014)

It’s been so busy around here lately that I completely forgot to mention that my backgrounder essay on James Napier Robertson’s Aotearoa classic, The Dark Horse, has been posted to NZ On Screen.

I love being able to stretch out on films like this and the opportunity comes along too rarely.

The real Genesis Potene was a gentle giant. In the documentary that inspired The Dark Horse, Jim Marbrook‘s Dark Horse (2003). Genesis talks at a rate of knots, but not as fast as he plays chess. He was a champion speed-chess player (and shit-talker at the board), never missing an opportunity to school whoever he was playing.

Curtis’ interpretation is quieter, much more vulnerable. That’s a function of the compressed story that Robertson has to tell. All the chapters of Gen’s life need to happen in movie time, which — by necessity — means concision and excision. In the feature film version, Genesis is not married and has no children. When he is released from the psychiatric facility, it is to the care of a fictional brother (Ariki, played by Wayne Hapi) and to the gang hangout of the Vagrants and the bedroom occupied by (semi-fictionalised) teenage nephew Mana (James Rolleston).

Genesis sees the lifestyle that Mana is destined for, along with so many others, and decides he can offer an alternative. There’s a local chess club hangout — the Eastern Knights — and he can coach them to the national championships. Nobody else thinks that he can do it but, one thing the character does draw wholeheartedly from the Genesis in Marbrook’s documentary is self-belief.

If you haven’t seen The Dark Horse, you really should remedy that. Curtis is astounding as Genesis but the revelation is Wayne Hapi:

Following in the line of other scene-stealing first-time Māori actors like Anzac Wallace (Utu) and Lawrence Makoare (Lord of the Rings), Hapi was discovered at the local WINZ office looking for a job.

There’s an intensity and dignity to Hapi’s performance that turns what might easily have fallen into cliché into the second beating heart of the film. Robertson shoots the scenes of Curtis and Hapi together with them both in frame throughout, even while still using a classic shot-reverse-shot structure. Whenever the focus is on one brother, the other always remains present in the frame, emphasising their relationship even as the drama of the scene threatens it.

Cunningly, I managed to get a quote in there from my own podcast. I interviewed Curtis and Rolleston for Rancho Notorious1 when the film arrived in cinemas.