'Utu’ gives a strange freedom—N.Y. critic

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 8

'Utu’ gives a strange freedom—N.Y. critic

NZPA staff correspondent Washington

Pauline Kael, considered by many to be the best film critic in the United States, has given the film, “Utu„” a long and perceptive review in the “New Yorker.” She describes the director, Geoff Murphy, as having an instinct for popular entertainment and “a deracinated kind of hip lyricism.”

These qualities fuse quite miraculously in “Utu,” she says, with Murphy using the conventions of John Ford’s cavalry-and-Indians westerns, but as a form of international shorthand to break the ice, and for allusions and contrasts.

By 1870, the year in which the film is set, she notes, the Maoris know how to mock the English, playing off the expectations that they will behave like ignorant sa-

Ms Kael defines Utu carefully as a word that means honour and includes ritualised revenge. She points out that it led to continuous fighting between tribes, and that as more and more land-hungry British settlers arrived the wars between the Maori and the British became wars of atrocities on both sides.

Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), the central figure of the film, newly tattooed, has a new aura, she says. “He is like a living version of the totemic figures that are now on exhibit in the Maori show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.” With his long, thick, black hair and his moustache and elated eyes adding to the symmetrical pattern, he suggests the posters for the Broadway musical, “Cats.” He is a commanding pres-

ence — a Maori Che Guevara, says Ms Kael.

When he is dressed for “Utu” in his red British Army jacket, and with a military cap perched on his matted hair, it is as if all the contradictions in the society were popping out of his skin — “as if he couldn’t contain them any more.” Ms Kael says that “at times, when you are looking at Maori, with their beautiful broad, relaxed faces, you cannot tell which side they are on — then you realise that this confusion is part of the subject. “Te Wheke and his guerrillas deck themselves out in a rag-tag assortment of parts of British military uniforms and scraps of Victorian clothing with hatchets, knives, and guns stuck into their belts and boots.

“They have turned themselves into the Europeans’ image of them as butchers and buffoons. (They are like American blacks playing jungle bunny.) “If that is what the Europeans think they are, that is what they will be. That is all that is left for them to be. In murdering the British, they are murdering themselves anyway,” says Ms Kael.

She describes the scene where one of Te Wheke’s men plunges his face in a sack of flour, then says, “I’ve only been one of them for a minute, and already I hate you Maori.”

Mimicry goes on at sO many levels that the viewer may be laughing, exhilarated by constant discovery, yet be a little “discombobulated and scared,” she says. “I doubt if any other director has treated the conventions of this colonial-epic form with Murphy’s offhand audacity. He turns the form into a mirror of racism.”

Ms Kael notes the “curves” that Murphy and the co-writer, Keith Aberdein, throw, for ex-

ample, skewering expectations that Te Wheke and Williamson (Bruno Lawrence) will meet in a final shoot-out — “of course, it is richer this way.” She notes, too, touches such as a satirical “Marching through Georgia” coming through on the soundtrack, and compares Te Wheke with Toshiro Mifune’s Macbeth in “Throne of Blood,” but adds that Murphy seems to be directing with a grin on his face. “No doubt Murphy was conscious of taking a balanced, non-judgmental position, but you feel that the material itself, and his own instincts, dictated it.

“He couldn’t have made this movie any other way, because it is a comedy about the characters’ racial expectations of each other, which come out of the tragedy of their history — a history too grotesque for tears.

“In one sequence, the soldiers are tracking the guerrillas, and Te Wheke, catching their scent, sniffs the air, his dogs, also sniffing, turn their heads this way and that,” says Ms Kael.

“Murphy’s absurdism is a matter of temperament — it’s part of the texture of the movie, which appears to be a reasonably accurate version of a totally crazy birth of a nation.

“. . . Because we are not asked to respond in the banal ways that actionadventure movies usually impose on us — there is noone we could conceivably root for — we are free to respond to much more. We are turned loose inside this epic, and the freedom is strange and pleasurable. “Some of it has to do with the Maori, who have the placid features of Gauguin’s Polynesians but appear to be completely expressive, and have such a fluent, unaffected wit that they seem to be plugged into the cosmos in a different way from the British,” says Ms Kael.