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Whale Rider Review by Adrian Hyland Pai, the 11-year-old played by Keisha Castle-Hughes in Niki Caro's new film "Whale Rider", is not an ordinary girl. Her mother and twin brother both died in the act of bringing her into the world, and consequently every memory she has carries with it a subconscious burden of pain and loss. Unlike the other children of her hometown Whangara, situated on the remote east coast of New Zealand's north island, Pai has no mental comfort zone; for her there has always been something missing. She has no interest in the schoolyard games of her peers, because they don't satisfy the much deeper curiosity that she feels about the world around her. Pai's emotional frame of reference is closer to that of an adult than a child, and Castle-Hughes embodies this sense of separateness and strength perfectly. Koro, Pai's grandfather, played by Rawiri Paratene, has taken care of his granddaughter during the eleven years since her traumatised father, unable to cope with his loss, left for Europe. Koro's guide in life is his tikanga, his understanding of Maori values and customs, and as a rangatira, or chief, he is custodian both to Pai and the male lineage that is central to Maori culture. In Pai he sees both the granddaughter he loves and the male heir denied to him when her brother died during childbirth, and the film's power comes from its exploration of an inspired central conflict: the confusion of an adult versus the curiosity of a child. "Whale Rider" makes you feel there can be only one winner. There are other films in recent years that have possessed the kind of dramatic power summoned up by "Whale Rider"; Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother" and Michael Mann's "The Insider" spring to mind. However, the lead actor in "Whale Rider" is a child, and to find another film with which it can be compared I think you need to go back to Carrol Ballard's "The Black Stallion", released more than 20 years ago. Both films are acutely suggestive of a world other than the one in which we live, both benefit from a miraculous piece of child casting, and director Niki Caro shares with Ballard a rare gift: the ability to create anticipation not through suspense 'mechanisms' or 'devices', but through her own personal sense of film rhythm. Watching "Whale Rider" is a bit like watching the tide come in, gently and inevitably, and it's unsurprising that the awards it has won at festivals around the world have been 'audience' awards, because it's the kind of film that changes your mood, and makes you think about the importance of movies. There are scenes in this film so mysteriously powerful that one comes away wondering how the filmmakers achieved the effects they did. When Koro takes the group of young men that are his students out on a boat, in the hope that by retrieving the whale's tooth he has thrown over the side one will show himself to be the heir that he searches for, there is the sense that this is a day of destiny. Although the skies may be clear, and the water calm, we feel the pull of the turbulent emotional currents that are running inside this proud old man; each moment seems charged with expectation. When his prophecy goes unfulfilled, he expresses his disappointment simply, with a bow of his head, and the moment is heartbreaking. This scene is one of the high watermarks of "Whale Rider", and a good example of the way in which the film manages to link the spirit world of the Maori with the everyday lives of the characters, in such a way that we take it for granted. Throughout the film the photography, by Leon Narbey, is beautiful without being pictorial, and his director seems to have figured out that by depicting the surface realistically she will be able to suggest what is below the surface with far greater eloquence than if she had chosen to 'show' the 'other world'. The music, when it arrives, serves to heighten the power of the images, and the separate elements of the film fit together like a glove; "Whale Rider" is an exercise in stylistic modesty that invokes a well of passion. The film has flaws, the main one being its ending, which is not as transcendent or powerful as the one I had foreseen; it feels somewhat untrue to the deep current of sadness that flows through the rest of the film. The symbolic importance of the whales is not articulated with the same clarity with which Caro depicts the human activity in her film, and the director runs into a problem with the arrival of the whales on the beach: they are the physical manifestation of the spirit world that has been left to the audience's imagination up until that point, and for their appearance not to be a let-down there needs to be an element of surprise or awe when we behold them. The only surprise I felt was at how small they were. However this disappointment doesn't linger because, even if the 'special effects' don't convince, the actors do, especially Rawiri Paratene, who as Koro conveys the sense of a life lived unequivocally. Paratene carries the weight of the film's burden as a depiction of traditional Maori life, and he succeeds by taking us inside the soul of Koro, so that we feel his confusion. We also feel his dignity, and this film is so hypnotic that you may feel it for quite a few hours afterwards. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |