FACTS, FAIRYTALES AND THE POLITICS OF STORYTELLING
An Interview with Gaylene Preston
Cineaste, Fall 2005
by Helen Frances

New Zealand director Gaylene Preston has been acclaimed as one of the country’s finest filmmakers since her first film, the fantasy/comedy/thriller, Mr. Wrong, in 1984. Since then she has made the feature film Ruby and Rata (1990), the miniseries Bread and Roses (1994), and the feature documentary War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (1995), as well as directing and producing a substantial number of other documentaries. She was appointed New Zealand’s first Filmmaker Laureate in 2001 and she is also an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for filmmaking.

Preston has a reputation for being an unorthodox feminist and individualist, a strong woman who was raised on the dark, stormy West Coast of New Zealand, the setting for her latest film, Perfect Strangers, which is her second filmic foray into the world of the macabre. The film is distinctively New Zealand in its setting and characters while drawing on universally recognizable motifs and themes of fairy tale, horror, fantasy, and insights about human psychology.

The story is played out between two main characters. Melanie (Rachael Blake), a woman unlucky in love, who works in a fish ‘n’ chips shop, is enticed away one night to an island by a ‘perfect stranger,’ the Man (Sam Neill), who remains unnamed. With his Italian shoes and ‘cultured’ background, the dark, mysterious stranger is a romantic, tempting opposite for her, far from her experience of life and the rough blokes of the coast who hunt, shoot, fish, and fart in bed. Bill (Joel Tobeck), a local hunter whom Melanie once dated and rejected, later becomes the third character in an entrapping triangle.

In a hut on the island the tall, dark stranger treats Melanie to a candlelit bath. To the accompaniment of “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly (one of several musical commentaries on the action), he chops chicken and burns her clothes. She is thus prepared for her debut as female lead in one of his versions of reality.

Preston has worked in the field of art therapy and her background is evident in this film. The dynamics of the characters exemplify the effect of unconscious internal material (the film we run inside our heads) on external relationships. From this point of view the activities of the characters at times resemble a dance of shadow boxers. Victim, rescuer, persecutor—idealized and despised images of male and female roles zigzag, dance, and turn across the screen beneath the eye of a full West Coast moon.

Rachael Blake gives a nuanced performance as the apparently tough West Coast gal, who nevertheless shows she has the softer qualities expected in a female along with other less socially acceptable facets. She prepares to give the obsessive stranger what she thinks he wants, although her expectations, along with those of viewers, are turned on their head through the course of the film.

Plot and character twists maintain tension and pace, while the shots of a dark, brooding setting, lit with the occasional smile of light, create an uneasy atmosphere in which cast and coast mirror each other. The smiles of the Man, in fact, played with disturbing ambiguousness by Sam Neill, and his prey, Melanie, become more sinister as the plot deepens, while Bill, the uncouth bushman, reveals an unexpected capacity for reflection and compassion (laced perhaps with cunning?) as the film progresses. Perfect Strangers requires tolerance for ambiguity.

Preston challenges stereotyped notions of gender, fairy-tale romance, and characterization. She uses the kind of gritty realism and grotesque, outsized imagery often found in dream and fairy tale. The effect is comic, macabre, and, at times, confusing. But this is often the nature of madness. Candle-lit baths, knives, flimsy feminine clothing, a wheelbarrow, a freezer, and a tattooed cheek appear in situations that both disturb and at times amuse.

Rich in references and nuances, Perfect Strangers also throws light into a rather isolated region of the country and into a corner of the New Zealand psyche, eliciting further exploration and reflection about ideas of wholeness, psychological and social awareness, and the roles that internal images of masculinity and femininity play in relationships.

Perfect Strangers plays around with the boundaries of inner and outer realities and the tensions between different ways of seeing—between interior (subjective, imagined) reality and exterior (concrete, factual data) reality. This does not work for all viewers, although many moviegoers worldwide have responded to the film’s strangely haunting qualities. Perfect Strangers has screened at numerous international film festivals, including the London Film Festival, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival, as well as special screenings earlier this year at the New York and Los Angeles chapters of Women in Film and Television. Australian actress Rachael Blake won the Best Actress Award at both the Oporto International Film Festival in Portugal and the Vladivostok Film Festival. In June 2005, Perfect Strangers won the Best Film Award at The Female Eye Film Festival in Toronto.

As so often happens nowadays with offbeat foreign films, Perfect Strangers went straight to DVD in the United States without so much as a limited theatrical release. If you have not seen the film, we would advise you to stop reading here, and rent the DVD first, since the following interview contains numerous ‘plot spoilers.’ Cineaste spoke to Gaylene Preston in April 2005 at her home in Mt. Victoria, Wellington.

—Helen Frances