NZ Film Excellent

A State of Seige

directed by Vincent Ward

Five-fifteen on the last day of the Festival was an all New Zealand session, and for my money it took the cake. Vincent Wards first major film A State Of Seige was billed as the feature (although only seven minutes longer than Richard Turner's Two River's Meet which preceded it) and in many ways it turned out to be the finest piece of New Zealand film making I have ever seen. What made it so successful?

The answer is quite simple: Ward and his crew knew how to use the medium of film. They managed to translate Janet Frame's story, which is securely grounded in the medium of literature (words) into their own story, created out of light and shade, movement and stillness, expression and depiction.

Frame's novel concerns Malfred Signal, a newly retired Art teacher who has spent her life in a closed South Island township, teaching (or rather, telling) girls to paint and draw shadow, painting landscape water-colours without any people in them, and latterly, nursing her dying mother. She is a spinster, alone, living on quietly nurtured, unexciting dreams, and now at 53, later than everyone else, wanting to be free.

So she sells the family house and buys a cottage on Karemoana Island, "up North". Five days after she arrives a storm blows up, at night, and someone comes knocking at her door. The knocking, the storm, and the sound of the prowler swishing through the long grass, continue all night.

Her power is cut off at the outside main, and as the night develops Malfred's fear, and the methods she uses to control it, drive her deeper and deeper into her hidden memories. Morning comes, a stone is thrown through the window trapped in newspaper on which Malfred sees an unintelligible poem and the crayoned words "Help, Help". Three days later they find her, cold hand clutching the cold stone, dead.

The strength of the novel is in the way Frame develops each memory, moving surely but unobtrusively from the public to the private, allowing us to understand Malfred's hopes and fears, not through the terror of the night so much as in the way Malfred explains things, rationalises them and has come to live with them. Thus the presence of Wilfred, the one person with whom she has ever shared "a darker undercurrent" in a friendship, is scarcely mentioned in the first half of the book. Yet by the end this man, who has justified her being able to say "I have known love", with whom she went walking, riding and who kissed her once in the fern house before leaving for the war and not returning, has come right to the forefront of her imagination. It could even be him outside; rather, if it were him outside returned from the dead, she wouldn't let him in.

Malfred's thought processes correspond, on a slower time scale, with the popular idea of what happens when one dies and the seige she experiences that night in the cottage reflects the beseiging of her life by the outside world.

The film does not go into this in any great detail. Much of the simplification is circumstantial: we see little of Malfred's encounters with other people on Karemoana or her memories of events down South. This simplification is made inevitable by the low budget, but the remarkable thing is that instead of taking shortcuts the film makers have altered the nature of the story to render the extra details unnecessary.

Running at only 54 minutes A State Of Seige is of short story length and works splendidly as such. The film opens with an extended sequence of an old and battered bus doing the afternoon school run along the Wairarapa coast. Gone are all the conversations and experiences of the book's journey to Karemoana. In their place we see a middle aged woman dislocated from her environment, coping as only a person who has always known this dislocation can do.

This sets the method by which the film as a story develops. The particularities which make the story are reduced to generalities, but they are not stereotyped. Many things ensure this. Firstly, Malfred's possessions, (her photographs, teapot and cup, clothes, books) are very carefully and exquisitely established in our minds. This is done by a generally close, moving camera, which pans continuosly from Malfred to mantle piece, lampshade to Malfred. . . thus although we only learn of her experiences in a generalised way (with one or two exceptions) the detail of her present existence is more than enough to establish her reality.

The second insurance against stereotyping is the acting. Anne Flannery as Malfred has an extremely difficult job, creating a character with very little resort to words, who is literally scared to death, yet who all the while maintains a mental rationalisation and "mature" exterior as a defense. In a sense Malfred's mind unravels but it doesn't become untidy. Flannery captures this brilliantly, her expression, timing and depth of feeling playing a central role in the film's success.

While there is little dialogue, sound does have a vital role. All the natural sounds are acutely heard, and together with John Cousin's music are to the fore in establishing the tension and mood. These sounds also contribute greatly to the particularisation of the events.

There is one other aspect to the film which overrides everything else: the tone. In the opening sequence, the bus does not merely trundle along but appears in all its bloated dilapidation somewhat like a hippopotamus. In a word it is fascinating, and this fascination draws us into the film, into the cottage, into the mind of Malfred Signal.

Much of the credit for this must go to photographer Alun Bollinger. Whether gliding round the rooms of the cottage, capturing in extraordinary close-ups Malfred's eye or hand, or challenging the brutal pounding sea, Bollinger's camerawork is a powerful evocation of light, colour and shape, and most of all shadow. It represents in fact, all the years Malfred has spent in teaching girls to paint and never succeeding: it is her sustaining belief, her world.

Right near the end of the film, Malfred picks up the stone thrown through the window. Where once she told girls to see the stone, see its shadow, she now touches it, holds it. The film captures this moment superbly, and if the end follows suddenly after, on reflection, there really seems no way it could have gone on. To return to the short story analogy, such an ending often achieved by a sudden revelation or twist in meaning. Here, the revelation exists, but it follows naturally from the film and is in the fullest sense a proper conclusion.

A State of Seige is a remarkable achievement, by all who created its parts and by Vincent Ward and producer Timothy White (the joint screenwriters) who put it all together. If it is shown again, see it.

Simon Wilson

Stark Realism

Mean Streets

Directed by Martin Scorsese

I did not find Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets an easy film to watch. In fact, it grated in the worst possible way against my comfortably smug middle class feelings of ease and security. I remember walking out of Taxi Driver in a similar mood. I should have been prepared for what Mean Streets dished out.

The film kicks off on a high note. An oddly appropriate Phil Spector number overlays a brief title sequence, after which short snippets of film introduce the main characters. Harvey Keitel is Charley, apprentice mafioso and nephew to the local Godfather. Robert DeNiro plays Johnny Boy, a young thug with a death wish who blows up mail boxes for kicks. The two are a part of New York's Little Italy — the 'mean streets' of the title. Thugs, hookers and winos seem to make up the rest of the community which has long since gone rotten.

The disturbing feature of the film is the degree to which the spectator is made to feel personally involved. With a vivid documentary style Scorsese drags his audience, kicking and screaming, right into the heart of Little Italy. Starkly, economically, he shows us how a harsh, futile environment comes to breed callous, futile people. Semblances of honour and respect, which the Mafia once claimed, have become a grotesque joke — a charade which can scarcely be maintained. Gone are the days of luxury and privilege. The mafiosi of Mean Streets steal dope money from punks. They bicker and fight amongst themselves. In one scene Charley and his boys are beaten up by the overweight manager of a pool hall they attempt to collect protection money from.

Because for large portions of its length the film is content to meander, the sudden spurts of action which do occur are jarring. The violence of various scenes is reinforced and made more shocking by contrast with the seemingly indifferent pace of other sequences. Scorsese was to later employ this technique of contrasting action to create the horrific finale of Taxi Driver.

Another point that Scorsese likes to emphasise is that when people are shot, they do not often die immediately. Kung Fu's David Carradine makes a short and bloody appearance in Mean Streets. He is shot in the back (well, all over in fact) by a vengeful punk and seems to take forever to expire. It froze my innards to watch. Whatever happened to the quick, clean All American Death?

A weakness of Mean Streets is its sketchy development of character and motivation, the dialogue, often improvised, is idiomatic, incoherent; mumbled obscenities, albeit sociologically correct, throw little light on relationships. Hints at family loyalty do not fully explain Charley's obsessive reluctance to abandon Johnny Boy to his inevitable fate. Nevertheless their relationship, at least in narrative terms is supposed to be of pivotal importance. Fortunately Keitel and De Niro are superb actors. Their performance, complemented by uniformly good acting from the rest of a 'streetwise' cast, tends to compensate for the lightness of the script.

Furthermore Scorsese is blest with the abilities of cinematographer Kent Wakeford. Wakeford cheerfully and successfully breaks every known rule of movie photography in the course of the film. Insinuating his camera into the characters' lives he gets as close to the ideal of viewer participation (as opposed to passive observation) as is possible in an ostensibly fictional film. Wake ford excells in very difficult lighting situations, such as bar interiors. A wide angle view of Harvey Keitel, bathed in red light, lurching across a dance floor in an alcoholic haze, which is unforgettable.

Although Scorsese has succeeded in conveying a feeling for little Italy on the screen, he has done so only at the cost of cutting his film's dramatic interest. Story development is subjugated in a frenzied drive to create realism of atmosphere and setting. Magnificent as documentary, 'Mean Streets' is sheer hell as entertainment.

Don't go to this film looking for a good night out.

Costa Botes

More Sexploitation

Street of Joy

directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro

One is lead to expect great things from Street of Joy, expecially when it earned Tatsumi Kumashiro the distinction of Japan's Best Director for 1975.

Unfortunately it is difficult to take his "uninhibited look at prostitution in Japan" even remotely seriously. The fault is not his subject matter (the lives of five prostitutes in a brothel) nor his film-making skills — the camera work is excellent; rather his choice of what should be portrayed so emphatically on the screen.

Instead of building on a well-written script that most directors could have a field-day over, Kumashiro sought to de-emphasise the protagonists' point of view with his exceptionally long takes of the women at their work accompanied by a soundtrack of loud sensual noises. What could have been a sympathetic insight into the lives of hard-working whores is reduced to a marathon of fornication.

The sub-plots that relate love and marriage, youth and old-age to the profession, are depicted in a very witty manner, but are distressingly superficial. For the film's relatively short running time, such episodes only amounted to brief insignificant interludes.

The fact that there was a small migration of the Festival audience to the Exit would in all likelihood be Kumashiro's least worry. His sex ploited film assures commercial success (which it has enjoyed in Japan and Europe). It is simply distressing that the Japanese Film Industry honoured him for it. Like the comic strips inter spliced within the film, Street of Joy is a very sad joke.

Kevin John Young