KOMBI NATION
Directed by Grant Lahood; M, contains offensive language, sexual references and drug use.
FOR GOOD
Directed by Stuart McKenzie; R16.
THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY
Directed by Keith Hill; unrated.
Reality TV is cheap and fast; film is expensive, cumbersome and slow. That kind of thinking was akin to the rationale behind producer Larry Parr’s ill-fated series of low-budget films, in which pocket change would be handed to young-ish New Zealand directors to make art with, quickly and under the bureaucratic radar. The model, Parr said in interviews, was the American independent cinema of the late 80s-mid 90s, as documented in John Pierson’s anecdotal account, Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes. The reality was bankruptcy, with films unfinished and debts owing.
Two of those films – Kombi Nation and For Good – are now free to be seen. The reality TV/film equation has come back to haunt Kombi Nation in ways that could never have been anticipated. Director Grant Lahood and his cast and crew shot their film, which offers a fictionalised version of the reality TV process, on a shoestring in Europe in 1999. But just as Big Brother has rendered The Truman Show quaint rather than sinister and futuristic, developments in reality TV have long overtaken Lahood’s concept. A series called The Big OE stole its thunder several years ago.
Surely the only film in history to start in Levin and end in Italy, Kombi Nation is not without its charm: much of it is in the relaxed and often hilarious performance of Jason Whyte, an under-seen Wellington actor. As the fox in the henhouse, Whyte’s dubious character Scott tours Europe in a Kombi with three young Kiwi women (Loren Horsley, Genevieve McClean and Gentiane Lupi, all of whom are good) while cameras, both visible and hidden, roll. But if only the film were as loose as Whyte’s acting, or Scott’s behaviour – European scenery appears so fleetingly and so few locals are interacted with that Lahood could have shot this at home in front of matte paintings of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia. The result feels timid and is let down by not even looking much like reality TV. See The Blair Witch Project and The Office for two very different examples of how tired genres can be revived by mimicking the reality show’s formal limits. This one needed to push its fake documentary aesthetic further.
By contrast, For Good looks like television – of the Gibson Group or South Pacific Pictures variety – but wants to be a movie. The thing was shot on digital video, but as Florian Habicht’s recent, inventive Woodenhead showed, cheap DV can still look cinematic. Not here. A talking-heads script is shot prosaically, with some recurring, blurred, slo-mo footage of a girl on a horse cut in to remind us of the film’s portentous mythology -– based on interviews by Stuart McKenzie and Miranda Harcourt with the families of murder victims, initially for a play titled Portraits, For Good will immediately have New Zealand viewers thinking of murdered girls Karla Cardno and Kirsa Jensen. And not just their murders, but the aftermath of grief and blame-sharing, retribution and soul-searching.
Lost kids and wounded lives: this is Atom Egoyan material (Felicia’s Journey, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter), but without Egoyan’s emotional texture, richness or artistry. The plot contrives to have a young woman named Lisa (Michelle Langstone) pose as a journalist to interview convicted murderer Grant Wilson (Tim Balme) and the parents of the girl whom he killed, in a mirror of McKenzie and Harcourt’s own interviews with families (confounding that identification, Harcourt plays the mother; Tim Gordon plays the father). The performances range from the professional – Harcourt, Balme, Gordon – to the painful – Langstone, Adam Gardiner as Lisa’s flatmate – while the humour and conceptual intelligence that usually distinguish McKenzie’s writing are almost entirely absent. For Good feels as morbid and obscure as Lisa’s interest in Grant – it’s hard to be convinced that this is the best way to treat real stories and real grief.
Kombi Nation is on release in Wellington from this month and nationally from October; For Good is playing provincial centres (this week: Jensen’s hometown, Napier) in the International Film Festival. Keith Hill’s This Is Not a Love Story plays in next month’s inaugural Auckland Festival. Not connected to Larry Parr, but on the shelf for some time nonetheless – “this is a new millennium!” says one character – the film, which manages to be both laughably bad (both this and Kombi Nation feature boom mics in shot; only in Lahood’s film was it intentional) and strangely entertaining, takes place in a bohemian Auckland that is quiet, attractive and not entirely fictitious.
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy stars as Belinda, an Amélie-like woman who longs to become a writer, viewing the world from her K-Rd apartment and wafting ethereally through central Auckland in outfits by Zambesi. As befitting a New Zealand Amélie, she is more gauche and confused than adorable and kittenish, and Hill’s film is frequently complicit in ridiculing her pretensions (“Would you like me to read you a poem?” she offers unprompted). Stephen Lovatt’s Tony becomes the object of her obsession – he’s an actor on a long-running TV show who feels artistically undernourished (curiously, Lovatt has gone on to star in Neighbours) – while ex-Shortland Streeters Stelios Yiakmis, Bruce Hopkins and Peter Elliott add to the sense of the film being partly a vent for the mockery of Auckland’s TV industry (“The show’s tired, we’re all tired,” says one). Although Hill’s film is not exactly deep – the greatest challenge is figuring out how much of its humour is conscious and how much is not – it reveals the artistic life as a mask for ruthless self-interest in so jaundiced a way that its slot in the Auckland Festival can only be read as a sly commentary on the rest of the programme, if not the entire creative life of the city itself.