PERFECT STRANGERS - Reviewer Deborah Shepard
TAKE Screen Directors Guild of New Zealand Magazine, Autumn, May 2004

Gaylene Preston is one of those rare breeds of multi-talented, creative film-makers who works successfully in both drama and documentary format. She expresses her ideas across a range of genres from feminist thriller, to comedy, biopic, various strands of documentary including portrait of the artist, oral history, feminist documentary and now a film that spans several styles - feminist thriller, feminist fantasy, romantic thriller fantasy, black comedy and fable/fairytale. Through much of the work - Mr Wrong (1985), Kai Purakau: Keri Hulme - Teller of Tales, (1987) Ruby and Rata (1990), Married (1992), Bread and Roses (1993) War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (1995) Titless Wonders (2001) and Perfect Strangers (2004) there is a consistent thread linking the oeuvre. Women dominate the narrative, their particular experiences, their achievements, their dreams, their aspirations, their deepest fears and highest hopes are the subject of exploration. In each instance there is a feminist sensibility infusing the film-making, one that is fully cognisant of the male dominated nature of the New Zealand and wider film industry and one that seeks to rectify the imbalance. The results are often startling. Her films never aim to comfort or seduce. They are challenging, unsettling, unusual and Perfect Strangers with a plot that allows its female hero to plunge a knife into the body of a deranged tormentor and bring about his death, continues the tradition.

There's a touch of all of Gaylene's women-oriented movies in Perfect Strangers. Melanie shares the anti-hero qualities, the feisty wilfulness of both Rata and Ruby in Ruby and Rata. Like Sonja in Bread and Roses she overcomes significant obstacles and takes control of her destiny. Faced with a threat to her life she exhibits the will to survive of Neva McKenna, abducted, stripped and threatened with rape and death by Palestinian soldiers in World War II, in War Stories. But the strongest link is with Gaylene's very first feature Mr Wrong (1985) a film that emerged partly as a response to the cluster of male feature films which appeared in New Zealand in the late 1970s and early '80s. In those films - Sleeping Dogs (1977), Middle Age Spread (1979), Goodbye Pork Pie (1981),Smash Palace (1981), Carry Me Back (1982), Came a Hot Friday (1984), - women were never central to the plot. They were side-lined as the sex interest, the butt of male jokes, the women who got in the way of kiwi male bonding. And Gaylene, who worked as the art director on Middle Age Spread and gritted her teeth at the macho joke telling and being nick-named, 'Bruce,' was sufficiently ignited to want to intervene in the 'man alone' discourse and craft a film that presented a female and feminist perspective on aspects of being a woman in New Zealand society. As she reflected later, "I wanted to make a film that didn't have a car scene, didn't have a rape scene and didn't have Bruno Lawrence playing the tortured neurotic male with a gun and chooks." (1)

Mr Wrong was also a response to a particular moment in the history of international feminism when feminists were engaged in research and awareness-raising on the issue of violent crimes against women. As part of a world-wide campaign to empower women there were "Reclaim the Night" marches in Europe, America and New Zealand and the first self-defence classes for women were established. It was out of this phase of pro-active feminism and in response to feminist critiques of the thriller genre that Mr Wrong was conceived. Gaylene had formed the opinion that the thriller genre, with its depiction of pretty women as helpless victims of male predators, "had a lot to answer for" and in subtle ways had contributed to women's fear of the night. Reflecting on the fate of her female hero in Mr Wrong in a 1991 interview she said:

Unfortunately the fact is that women are victims of sexual violence far too often... There are a lot of crimes that are committed that are unsolved... a lot of people walking around New Zealand that have been killed in cars on deserted roads just like that... In this society there's a big silence left by the victims. Once you're dead you're silent. I had to empower the silent ones... (2)

Mr Wrong then aimed to reverse the classic formula by allowing the female victim an opportunity to connect with her inner resources and escape - there is actually a television clip in Mr Wrong, of Sue Lytolis conducting her 1980s self-defence classes for women, which the female hero, Meg, sees and draws upon when her life is under threat. Likewise in Perfect Strangers there appears to be a reference to an actual event in the opening stages of the film when Melanie is coaxed onto a boat and then abducted. The close-ups of Melanie locked in a claustrophobic cabin, desperately thumping on the ceiling and shouting to get out, are evocative of the tragic, disappearance of two Marlborough teenagers Olivia Hope and Ben Smart on New Years' Eve 1998. In her film, thankfully, Gaylene ensures there is no silence left by the victim. Melanie uses her grown-up wiles and gritty determination to extricate herself from the dangerous situation.

But there is something more going on in Perfect Strangers. Gaylene is reworking ideas and themes that have interested her since the 1980s but this time within a post feminist frame. Where Perfect Strangers departs from Mr Wrong is in the construction of its female hero as a sexually seductive woman, very aware of her power over the local young men. This character is miles away from pragmatic, down-to-earth Meg in Mr Wrong who ran through the wintery night in a voluminous cotton nightie with parka slung on top, to escape her tormentor. Melanie in contrast is a vision of femininity, her hair soft and wispy, her make-up delicately applied, her dress low-cut and clinging to her body. In the intervening years, since Mr Wrong feminist film-makers have graduated from the change-oriented politics of the 1970s to a more sophisticated and even contradictory feminism, one that allows a female director the space to recreate and expand her female character. This doesn't imply a shallow role swapping which is what has happened in Hollywood. One of Gaylene's motivations for making this film was to complicate what she saw happening in American movies:

I went to the AFM in Los Angeles in 1990 and every poster had gone from guys with guns to girls with guns - and the girls always had big tits and long legs - so this was meant to be proactive females on screen... I wanted to explore something a bit more modern and less same old same old. (3)

Perfect Strangers then began as an exploration of romantic love, or of the process of falling in love which Gaylene believes is, "to fall into a state of madness" and gradually evolved into something more complicated, something that mimics the twists and turns of an emotional female mind gripped by desire. The result is a complex female character. Melanie (Rachel Blake Lantana) combines a stroppy, bordering on perverse streak with feminine vulnerability, a canny resourcefulness with an edgy emotionality. Bored with her life as a fish and chip shop assistant in small town, Gryemouth and anxious to escape her predictable fate as the future wife of Bill, a solid, reliable, kiwi joker, she fantasizes about meeting the perfect stranger. Miraculously her dream comes true. A suave, silent stranger (Sam Neill) enters her life, complete with all the necessary accoutrements of a Prince Charming - there is a humourous reference to Mr Wrong in the seduction sequence of Perfect Strangers, the perfect red rose placed alongside two glasses of champagne, echoing the gifts of the spooky predator in Mr Wrong. Very quickly Melanie discovers she has been granted more than she wished for. Her Prince Charming is in fact a psychopath who wants to marry her and lock her away in a tiny cabin at sea and keep her there for his enjoyment. The dream has turned nasty and Melanie must gather her wits and her strength and engage in a battle for survival. The struggle becomes violent and she seriously wounds the man. Now she has the upper hand or does she? Realising that her only way out of eternal entrapment, is by enlisting the help of the man she has just seriously wounded, she switches to saviour. At this point the film changes key and moves into a different, more experimental mode, something that feels more like fable, or hallucinatory love story. As Melanie, carefully, gingerly stitches him together again she becomes aware of her tormentor's fragility, of the wounded human being beneath the psychologically deranged man and she melts.

This is not such a new development in New Zealand women's film. When Melanie sleeps with the inert body of her former tormentor, her kiss like a fairytale bringing him back to life and love-making, the film allies itself with a tradition of experimental female film-making that began in the 1990s. Directors like Jane Campion, Alison Maclean, Niki Caro, Jessica Hobbs, Fiona Samuel, Christine Parker, Nicky Marshall, Gillian Roberts, Katherine Fry and Christine Jeffs have all mined the rich territory of the female unconscious and interestingly a number have been drawn to the erotic possibilities inherent in a relationship between a woman and an unconscious man. In Alison Maclean's Kitchen Sink a woman delivers a tiny foetus-like character from her kitchen sink who slowly swells, in her bath, into a fully grown man. In turn fascinated and repelled by his slumbering sexuality, the woman is driven on by her curiosity and sexual desire. She proceeds to civilise him, trimming his eyebrows, shaving his body, moulding and preparing him to share her bed. In Niki Caro's Sure to Rise the theme resurfaces when a young woman rescues an unconscious parachutist and drags him home to her bed where he lies inert under her gentle ministrations. And the theme recurs yet again in Overnight by Fiona Samuel and Jessica Hobbs when Sina knocks an intruder unconscious with a small buddha and then hauls his heavy weight into bed with her. In all of these films it is the vulnerability of the subdued male figure that appeals, his suspended fragility making him more human, more loveable. It has been this very area in Perfect Strangers however beginning with the exhilirating moment (depending on your gender) when the female character stabs the male tormentor, that has produced disquiet. It is the subversive shift and Melanie's rapid trajectory from victim to oppressor to lover, that some male reviewers have objected to. It isn't plausible they argue although follow the logic of emotional entanglement and the changes seem inevitable. In Reframing Women: a history of New Zealand film I labelled this strand of film-making "the wild zone" borrowing a term first used by literary critic Elaine Showalter (1981) to refer to a 'a no-man's land of women's culture that is unique to women and unknown to men.' And that may explain the male resistance. Such film-making is oppositional, it challenges the status quo, disrupts conventional modes of representation and clearly it sometimes alienates the male viewer.

Perfect Strangers has been well received internationally. Diana Rigg of the ABC awarded the film a five star rating and located it in an impressive tradition of female 'anti-Romance' films, comparing Preston's film with works by Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Virginie Despente and Jane Campion with Perfect Strangers 'the wildest anti-romance of all." Rigg was so appreciative that she also described Preston as, "a filmmaker at the height of her powers." The Sunday Telegraph referred to the film as "a little gem, full of great atmosphere" and David Stratton in Variety considered it, "taut and well directed." But the reception in New Zealand has been less than generous. The reviewers for Metro, the Sunday Star Times, the Auckland Herald and the Listener have been unequivocably critical of what they perceive to be a 'weak', 'incoherent', and even 'weird' plot and for failing to conform to the rules of naturalistic narrative - "basic script writing rules and structure have been thrown out the window." The criticisms on this level are picky. One reviewer stuggles with the image of a dead Sam Neill, "trundled around in a wheelbarrow." Another finds fault with aspects of naturalistic detail and continuity: "a deep puncture wound is laboriously stitched... people wade across a bay to a boat which is tied up at a jetty; even the old classic of a shipwreck survivor with instantly dry clothes gets an outing." But what about the visual whimsy of Melanie wheeling the man across the bay in a wheelbarrow? Is it not reminiscent of the surreal scenes of a mother playing the piano and a child pirouetting in the sand, in a film which was loved for precisely those unusual elements? One of the reviews compared the plot of Perfect Strangers with the thriller Dead Calm a film that was also set at sea and starred Sam Neill. It was an interesting comparison for in that film there are scenes that stretch credibility to the limits. When Sam Neill finds himself trapped in a watertight compartment his only hope of survival is a small air pipe filled with cockroaches the size of your palm. And towards the end of the film, the psychopath riddled with bullet wounds, dunked and trapped under the water for at least half a day is resurrected one last time in a bloodcurdling final twist. As viewers educated in the rules of the thriller genre, we are prepared to suspend belief. We have been doing this since Arthur Penn's spectacularly choreographed, extended shoot-out finale to Bonnie and Clyde (1967) because we enjoy the tension and the spectacle, the fantasy and the escape. Perhaps then with Perfect Strangers we just need more exposure and a little more open-mindedness to the chimerical possibilities inherent in a table-turning, feminist film. In a more receptive frame of mind we might then appreciate the inventive touch of a film-maker "at the height of her powers."

1. Deborah Shepard. Reframing Women: a history of New Zealand film. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2000:
2. Deborah Shepard. "Writing a Woman Film-Maker's Life and Work: A Biofilmography of Gaylene Preston." MA thesis, University of Auckland 1992.
3. Interview with Gaylene Preston. SPADA conference newsletter, October 2003.