First time actor, Stella Bennett aka Benee, more than holds her own, especially with the music as you might imagine. Photo: Supplied
New Zealand in 1979 was years behind the rest of the world and for young people desperate to keep in touch with the fast-moving popular music scene, it must have felt like torture. Vinyl records took months to get to us and then when they did finally arrive the government put a 40 percent sales tax on top making it a very expensive pastime indeed.
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But New Zealand's youth certainly knew that something was up, and they wanted to be a part of it, no matter the obstacles. In Head South, Christchurch schoolboy Angus (played by Ed Oxenbould) gets little parcels of potential from his older brother Rory in London, and when he hears John Lydon and Public image Limited for the first time, his mind - and the screen - literally expands in front of our eyes.
No more long hair, no more surfing, and no idea how to make these vague dreams happen.
While Angus is getting glimpses of a more exciting life to come, the rest of Christchurch is in the doldrums. His mother has moved out to stay in a motel for a while, leaving two weeks of casseroles in the freezer for him and his dad, Gordon (played by Márton Csókás). And three and a half thousand kilometres away 270 people have just died when an Air New Zealand DC-10 crashed into the side of a volcano, sending shockwaves through a country that believed that distance and size insulated it from those disasters.
Antarctica is a presence in Head South. Robert Falcon Scott's famous failure to survive his trip to the South Pole in 1912 also looms. When non-musician Angus has the temerity to audition Kirsten (played by Stella Bennett - better known as the pop star Benee) for his band that doesn't exist yet, she plays him a song inspired by that fateful expedition, lending the film its title at the same time.
That audition has a sense of urgency about it because Angus has managed to score himself a support slot at a gig by popular New Wave band The Cursed this very Friday. He needs an amplifier, a drummer, a guitarist and arguably a couple of songs might help too.
Angus is the alter-ego of writer-director Jonathan Ogilvie, who has managed the challenging feat of recreating the look and feel of 1979 Christchurch thanks to a little bit of film cunning. I was reminded of that famous quote from Kurosawa, when asked by Sidney Lumet why he composed a particular shot in his epic Ran: His answer was that if he'd panned the camera one inch to the left, the Sony factory would be sitting there exposed, and if he'd panned an inch to the right, we would see the airport …
Somehow Angus - despite being fairly dorky and self-centred as teenagers can be - manages to win support from some unlikely sources. Frazer, proprietor of the hip record store Middle Earth Records (played by Jackson Bliss), exotic Holly (Roxie Mohebbi) who may or may not actually be from faraway London, and then there's Kirsten herself - an artist stuck in a chemist shop, somehow giving inexperienced rubes like Angus the time of day.
There's another theme running through Head South that I've been thinking about a lot since I saw it - and also Robert Zemeckis's Here - and that's how places are containers for memories, and those memories are what we sometimes call ghosts. By making the movie, Ogilvie has conjured up the ghosts of his past - rediscovering them in what's left behind of the Christchurch he grew up in.
Ed Oxenbould as Angus. Photo: Dan Slevin
The film has the good sense to cast as much experience as possible. Oxenbould has worked for over a decade in Australia but still convinces as a kiwi schoolboy, and it's always a pleasure when Márton Csókás returns to New Zealand - I have a theory that he might be our highest grossing actor, he's been working steadily overseas for nearly 30 years - and Gordon is that rare thing in New Zealand cinema, the "good dad".
Those two balance first-timer Bennett who more than holds her own, especially with the music as you might imagine. She reminded me of a young Florence Pugh, although she doesn't have all that irrepressible energy. Not yet, at least.
Speaking of the music, I refuse to be nostalgic about punk and can appreciate its democratising qualities over and above the actual noises being made, but nostalgia is the reason why Head South exists. There's a rosy glow around everything, bouncing highlights off the production's remarkable attention to detail, and the dark side of the city (and the period) is there but it has taken a back seat for this particular ride.
Head South is rated R16, for violence, drug use, offensive language and sexual coercion and is on limited release around the country. I hope that word-of-mouth will see that run extended for a while.
