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Broken English
Threat advisory: Elevated - Significant risk of entertaining activities
Movie propaganda
Sometimes when you make love, you make war. From the producers of "Once were warriors".
Croatian-born Nina (Aleksandra Vujcic) escapes with her family from their war ravaged homeland to the culturally mixed suburbs of Auckland. Smothered by the controlling love of her volatile father Ivan (Rade Serbedzjia), she finds tender romance when she falls in love with Eddie (Julian Arahanga), a New Zealand Maori. Frustrated, Nina knows there is no chance that she and Eddie can afford to start their own life together, until she's offered a large sum of money to marry Wu (Li Yang), a Chinese political refugee, thus allowing him resident status. Ivan learns of Nina's marriage of convenience and is further enraged when he discovers she is also pregnant. Desperate to reassert his control over her, Ivan risks alienating his entire family when he tries to tear Nina away from the man she truly loves.
Intelligence analyst
Special Agent Matti
Theatrical report
Once were warriors this ain't, but it never really tries to be, so that's not a problem. What it is, is a cross-cultural love story that boldly goes where films don't tend to go.
About the only similarities with Warriors (and you will inevitably compare the two) are the aggressive father figure and a few of the cast, but the focus is more on Nina than Ivan, and that makes all the difference. Nina has as much of an aggressive outlook on life as her father. She has survived rocket attacks and shrapnel fire to take up a new life in a new land, and throughout it all she has been her own person. Or, as her father says of his two sensual daughters, "You are out of control!" (That line particularly delights the two actors who played Nina and Vanya, and given what they wore in the film and at the première, it doesn't surprise me one bit!)
On its own merits, Broken English is a dramatic, often funny, often cruel, always real film. it is a lot more open than Warriors, perhaps because of the clashes which never allow a deep communication between the assorted cultures (Maori, Croatian, Serbian, Chinese, Polynesian, post-colonial New Zealand) which provide the base for the story. In some sense there is a battle between the father-daughter conflict and the racial conflict for pre-eminence, which I found diluted the viewing experience somewhat, but not so much that I didn't enjoy watching. A special hoorah to the filmmakers for not subtitling every piece of non-English dialogue, there was no need, and I really hate subtitles.
The actors' performances are all brilliant: lifelike, intense, confused, aggressive, injured. There is a danger when mixing a variety of actors (let alone cultures) that you will end up with a mish-mash of clashing Styles, but director gregor Nicholas has successfully avoided this. Aleksandra's characterisation is wonderfully out of control - she is such a wild individual that you just know she is going to end up in trouble. And I like that in a girl. Or a boy.
Three things to remember, then:
- Don't go expecting Warriors
- Get out of control
- Pauline Hanson eat your heart out.
Security censorship classification
MA 15+
Not for public release in Australia before date
Village Cinemas from right now.
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