★★★★ - THE POST
- We Were Dangerous: Young Kiwi stars shine in Heavenly-esque drama -
Thirty years after Heavenly Creatures marked out Peter Jackson as film-maker to watch and introduced the world to the twin talents of Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, another Christchurch-set and shot 1950s drama looks set to showcase our cinematic storytelling abilities internationally .
Director and co-writer Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s (one of the many wāhine who brought the brilliant Waru to life back in 2017) debut feature has already taken home a Special Jury Prize at March’s SXSW Festival.
But while We Were Dangerous is set in the same year as when Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme took the former’s mother out for a walk in Victoria Park, also has teenage girls as its protagonists and is mainly focused on an area just a few kilometres away – Banks Peninsula’s Ōtamahua (Quail Island) – its world view and tone is decidedly different.
There’s no Borovonia or Hollywood fantasies for Nelly (Erana James), Daisy (Manaia Hall) and Lou (Nathalie Morris), just a shared desire to escape The School for Incorrigible and Delinquent Girls and its maniacal matron (Rima Te Wiata).
Nelly and Daisy have already been thwarted in one attempt, a near thing that prompted the shift from the mainland to the isolated island that already had a “long history of accommodating dubious people”.
“If the island can contain leprosy, then it can keep a few girls on heat,” one of the school’s administrators reasons, relieved to have found a solution that should mean the chances of their “waifs, strays, delinquents and whores” causing any more trouble is unlikely.
However, while the Matron is sure she can put her charges “back on the right path”, others wonder if “being wives and mothers may be beyond them”.
What follows is an entertaining battle of wills between our young trio and their guardian, while they also desperately search for a way to avoid their seemingly inevitable “fate”.
Stewart-Te Whiu makes terrific use of her windswept and exposed location (although Quail Island has also never looked more picturesque), its extremes often reflecting the characters’ outlooks or mood, while co-writer Maddie Dai (best-known as a cartoonist for The New Yorker) apparently drew on her great-grandfather’s experiences of island imprisonment, Maurice Gee’s novel Live Bodies, eugenicist William Chapple’s The Fertility of the Unfit, the 1954 Mazengarb Report and the still-ongoing Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care to craft this absorbing and occasionally harrowing conceit.
However, at the centre – and the heart - of this Kiwi cross between The Magdalene Sisters and The Shawshank Redemption, are a cadre of fabulous performances. Te Wiata (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Housebound) gives great villain as the School’s devoted spiritual educator, while The Changeover’s James, One Lane Bridge’s Morris and newcomer Hall are simply superb as the triumvirate determined not to submit to the desire of others to turn them into “obedient, marriageable ladies”, or rob them even further of determining their own futures.
- James Croot, THE POST
We Were Dangerous is now playing at Light House Cinema!