The promised Whale Rider post
May. 11th, 2010 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbeeReading Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead made me aware of how little New Zealand literature I've read. With all due respect to my hockey-loving, snow-knowing-about friends, it's a bit embarrassing to realise your bookshelf holds more Canadians than citizens of your country's closest cultural neighbour. Now, this is me, so instead of seeking out Proper Grown-up Literature, I went for the YA/middle grade shelves, and made the obvious choice: Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. It's a small book, and I read it quickly, and it left me both a bit teary, and slightly disappointed. So I sought out the movie, which I had never seen before. (For no particular reason, other than that I go through phases of living under a cultural rock, and in 2002 I was probably busy reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the sixteenth time, or something equally awesome awesome.)
If the book left me a bit teary, the movie had me in floods of tears, curled up in my armchair while the cat batted anxiously at my face and wondered if this meant I wasn't going to give him a second dinner. (I wasn't.) The movie is both smaller and larger than the book, and -- in stark contrast to the novel -- is entirely the story of its heroine.
The first thing that surprised me about the novel was that it was told from a man's point-of-view. The story's first person narrator is Rawiri, the uncle of the heroine (called Kahu in the book, and Paikea -- Pai -- in the movie). He's a likeable character, sixteen years older than his niece and devoted to her. One of the most interesting sections of the book is the time he spends in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and any scene involving him and Nani Flowers (in this book, she and Koro are Kahu's great-grandparents; the movie took a generation out) is instantly hilarious.
The problem with his narrative, of course, is that it separates us from Kahu, and in the eyes of a doting uncle, she's not so much a character as a symbol. Frequent mention is made of her white dresses and ribbons; in a vivid, often political novel, Kahu is little more than a Symbol of Feminine Hope.
By contrast, the movie's Pai is a rough and tumble kid, usually seen wearing a rugby jersey and a skirt, with messy curls framing a solemn, clever face. She's older than the Kahu of the novel, too, and more outgoing. In one of the first scenes, she comes across her grandmother and a trio of her friends playing cards and pretending very, very hard that they haven't been smoking.
"Maori women shouldn't smoke," she tells them, with all the authority of a child repeating without thought a very important lesson she has taken to heart. "It destroys their childbearing skills."
She walks away, leaving the quartet of women, none a day under sixty, to exchange glances. Finally one mutters, "Got to be smoking in a pretty funny place to destroy the childbearing parts."
And that's another thing about the movie: it is about women. Women of all ages. Nani Flowers and her friends, Rawiri's girlfriend, even Ana, the white woman Pai's father has met in Germany, who is carrying his child. Even without dialogue, their connections are visible and powerful. They're not necessarily allies - Nani Flowers has no time for Rawiri's girlfriend Maka, who loves Pai but doesn't know how to talk to her. They're raw and real.
Main character aside, the starkest difference between the book and movie is the relationship between Pai/Kahu and her (great)grandfather. In the book, he has no time for her, rejects her utterly. In the film, they're almost friends, but Pai continually oversteps his boundaries and upsets his sense of the way things should be. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly desperate to find and train his successor as the community's traditional leader, a role rejected by Pai's father, and pushes Pai away. I think it's one of the great feats of the film, that Koro is as sympathetic as he is reprehensible.
There are so many themes in this movie, and I'm not even remotely qualified to begin to talk about them. Feminism, family, the intersection of feminism in a colonialised tribal culture, the future of the Maori people and culture. It lacks the environmentalism of the novel, but it also lacks scenes told from the point of view of a senile whale, which I consider a win. I ... don't actually know enough about Maori culture and politics to know how well the film depicted them -- the director is white -- but I plan to hit the libraries and internets and find out.
Also, it is beautiful. This is an important and useful trait in a film. BEAUTIFUL. And Keisha Castle-Hughes is the most interesting and understated child actress I've seen in ages; I'm now determined to see that Nativity movie in which she starred as Mary a couple of years ago. (Apparently it bombed on account of how no one wanted to see a movie where the Virgin Mary was played by a teen single mother? IRONY, PEOPLES!)
So, um, yes. That.
If the book left me a bit teary, the movie had me in floods of tears, curled up in my armchair while the cat batted anxiously at my face and wondered if this meant I wasn't going to give him a second dinner. (I wasn't.) The movie is both smaller and larger than the book, and -- in stark contrast to the novel -- is entirely the story of its heroine.
The first thing that surprised me about the novel was that it was told from a man's point-of-view. The story's first person narrator is Rawiri, the uncle of the heroine (called Kahu in the book, and Paikea -- Pai -- in the movie). He's a likeable character, sixteen years older than his niece and devoted to her. One of the most interesting sections of the book is the time he spends in Australia and Papua New Guinea, and any scene involving him and Nani Flowers (in this book, she and Koro are Kahu's great-grandparents; the movie took a generation out) is instantly hilarious.
The problem with his narrative, of course, is that it separates us from Kahu, and in the eyes of a doting uncle, she's not so much a character as a symbol. Frequent mention is made of her white dresses and ribbons; in a vivid, often political novel, Kahu is little more than a Symbol of Feminine Hope.
By contrast, the movie's Pai is a rough and tumble kid, usually seen wearing a rugby jersey and a skirt, with messy curls framing a solemn, clever face. She's older than the Kahu of the novel, too, and more outgoing. In one of the first scenes, she comes across her grandmother and a trio of her friends playing cards and pretending very, very hard that they haven't been smoking.
"Maori women shouldn't smoke," she tells them, with all the authority of a child repeating without thought a very important lesson she has taken to heart. "It destroys their childbearing skills."
She walks away, leaving the quartet of women, none a day under sixty, to exchange glances. Finally one mutters, "Got to be smoking in a pretty funny place to destroy the childbearing parts."
And that's another thing about the movie: it is about women. Women of all ages. Nani Flowers and her friends, Rawiri's girlfriend, even Ana, the white woman Pai's father has met in Germany, who is carrying his child. Even without dialogue, their connections are visible and powerful. They're not necessarily allies - Nani Flowers has no time for Rawiri's girlfriend Maka, who loves Pai but doesn't know how to talk to her. They're raw and real.
Main character aside, the starkest difference between the book and movie is the relationship between Pai/Kahu and her (great)grandfather. In the book, he has no time for her, rejects her utterly. In the film, they're almost friends, but Pai continually oversteps his boundaries and upsets his sense of the way things should be. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly desperate to find and train his successor as the community's traditional leader, a role rejected by Pai's father, and pushes Pai away. I think it's one of the great feats of the film, that Koro is as sympathetic as he is reprehensible.
There are so many themes in this movie, and I'm not even remotely qualified to begin to talk about them. Feminism, family, the intersection of feminism in a colonialised tribal culture, the future of the Maori people and culture. It lacks the environmentalism of the novel, but it also lacks scenes told from the point of view of a senile whale, which I consider a win. I ... don't actually know enough about Maori culture and politics to know how well the film depicted them -- the director is white -- but I plan to hit the libraries and internets and find out.
Also, it is beautiful. This is an important and useful trait in a film. BEAUTIFUL. And Keisha Castle-Hughes is the most interesting and understated child actress I've seen in ages; I'm now determined to see that Nativity movie in which she starred as Mary a couple of years ago. (Apparently it bombed on account of how no one wanted to see a movie where the Virgin Mary was played by a teen single mother? IRONY, PEOPLES!)
So, um, yes. That.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 04:33 pm (UTC)Yes. And I think it's very important feat, too. Because it gives us reason to see why Pai/Kahu would want her Grandfather's respect, and want to go back and help him, instead of moving on to a Western life with her father.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 12:15 pm (UTC)EVARRRR
no subject
Date: 2010-08-09 12:18 am (UTC)(Adding you, if you don't mind.)