_Once Were Warriors_ reviewed by Lynne Star This review is copyright. All rights reserved. Permission must be sought from the author before it is used in any way. L.Star@massey.ac.nz First published in FMST : Feminist Studies in Aotearoa Electronic Journal FMST No. 9 June 16 1994 (FMST@stonebow.otago.ac.nz). ONCE WERE WARRIORS Director Lee Tamahori, Producer Robin Scholes, Script Riwia Brown. Such a shaky feeling from this film. Needing to talk and talk. Had to unload some of the images to women who would understand, had to persuade others to see it. Any film that affects me like this is a must see and I'll see it again. After the first wave I kept talking because women seemed frightened to see it. Frightened of the violence, worried about potential racism and 'unreal' images of tangata whenua and concerned that 'others' might get 'the wrong idea about New Zealand'. Colleagues from overseas uneasy, embarrassed, talking about 'not knowing how to read it' and worried about 'propaganda', sepia tones, predictable narrative and denouement, ie. technical bits. I on the other hand saw outstanding performances by the women - Rena Owen as the battered woman, Beth Heke, and Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell as her daughter, Grace. A brilliant rape scene - one of the best I've seen and the depiction of a young woman's reaction to rape. Better than the rape scene in Thelma and Louise because more drawn out and less 'dramatic': more rapes are like this than the stranger in the carpark variety. The domestic violence I found credible - more convincing than Farrah Fawcett Majors in The Burning Bed, which, at the time I saw it as a rerun on television, had me on my feet screaming at her to fight back - and more relevant to this culture, yet authentic rather than frighteningly or disgustingly overdone. The make-up was a lot better to start with. I've been watching quite a few violent Action movies lately (catch up for my new job and because of my interest in violence and masculinity) and this one didn't compare to say, The Fortress or Universal Soldier for gratuitous violence designed for sexual effect. Over three weeks later, many shots and sequences from Once Were Warriors are etched: Jake's face when he got violent, Beth's shattered one in the mirror the morning after, the family out in the hired car, the lonely haka of the young boy in the bare institutional gym, the abandoned freezing works chain where the gang meet, the backstreets and derelict cars of Auckland, the young woman staring up at her attacker and scrubbing in the bath afterwards, Beth's desperate attempts to extract Jake from the pub while the children complain and then sleep in the car outside. No amount of discussion about colour filters or stand-ins is going to eradicate that for me. The point seemed to me to be not that these were frustrated warriors - the women too - but that they were vulnerable, powerful and believable human beings many of them possessed of an exhilarating tenacity to survive, love and prosper in the face of potentially blighted lives. Warriors felt true, too, in the number of casualties generated by a system genocidal towards people without the appropriate Pakeha 'qualifications' and its understanding towards the limited options available and how people use them. Can you see Beth or her daughters at Contours Women's Gym for Bodily Renaissance? You can see Boogie (Taungaroa Emile) in his Culture Group though and you can see the marae on the shores of the lake where the karakia and the tangihanga ring out to welcome the dead and the living. You can see the systematic racism of the court system and how it creates new young 'clients' with 'attitude' whom it can work up into 'criminals'. Some of the characters are iconic. Jake, and his eldest son Nig, (Julian (Sonny) Arahanga) stand for so many frustrated and confused men who are not given basic validation and hope by either the Pakeha mainstream or their own Maori people. Their misdirected and self-destructive lashing out against two cultures which have failed them by beating up on women and other near men shows the bad habits of cultural displacement exhibited by so many first peoples and working class men. For warmth and pathos the sequences between Grace and Toot (Shannon Williams), the street kid who lives in the old car under the bridge, reminded me of the two beggars, the boy and his father, with their dream stories of a house (the sort advertised on television every night) which progressively becomes a castle in the film classic Dodes Ka Den by Kurosawa. The eldest daughter sadly but stoically putting the wrecked house in some semblance of order after the parties and the fighting is not an image I've seen a lot but speaks to the lives of so many girls - Polynesian and Pakeha - at High Schools all over the country who talk to 'Miss' and sometimes play truant and battle on. Grace's precious tract of words which she clutches and carries with her, tells her story, and became in my mind symbolic of the work of an indigenous feminist author like Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. There were a few moments when I didn't feel drawn in. I felt the singing in the early party scenes was a bit uptight - although it improved - and occasionally I caught the glimpse of inappropriate smiles on the faces of the kids. I also experienced some awkwardness in Beth's final speech about returning home, and the ending which (I agreed with my colleague) felt stilted. But we should remember not to keep trying to compare movies to some 'reality' which we assume is apart from movies in the old way we used to believe. This last homily especially seems to apply to those (Pakehas so far) ashamed and afraid of racism and 'wrong messages'. Would you say therefore that films like Margarethe Von Trotta's Marianne and Julienne or Broken Mirrors and should not be made because they give the wrong idea? I guess some would, but to me this is a film which portrays lives I have seen, and women I love, in a stunning debut for a new director who happens to be a Maori man. Special mentions too for Rewia Brown's script which extracted a women's version from Alan Duff's original novel, and for Temuera Morrison who finally got a challenging part as Jake and looked like he'd 'been there done that'. Stuart Dryburgh's intimate cinematography leant an acute realism which reminded me of his work in An Angel At My Table . Oh, and for Robin Scholes's thoughtful feminist production. How exhilarating to have two watershed New Zealand movies in as many years (the other one, Jane Campion's The Piano) ... talking about ourselves in new ways, ways which deal with difference, pain and tenacity, daring, sexuality and with women as central. Lynne Star teaches Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatu, Aotearoa/NZ. FMST invites submissions of short articles, reviews and research reports (up to 30K) : FMST@STONEBOW.OTAGO.AC.NZ Try out your ideas, comment on FMST, debate your research, review feminist books, films or issues relevant to women and Feminist Studies in Aotearoa and the Pacific.