Into the melting pot: gender, culture and identity. By JOE SHEPPARD.

THE CENTREPIECE of this year’s Festival was a celebration of local talent and ethnic diversity. Both the curtain raiser Take 3 and the main feature, Sima Urale’s Apron Strings, danced closely with the typecast roles that race plays in this country, but the stories ultimately championed the courage required to confront such obstacles and to assert individual identity.

Roseanne Liang’s Take 3 got the audience warmed up with a few laughs before the more dramatic main feature. Auckland director Liang was the unlikely media darling of the festival circuit a few years back after the candid autobiography Banana in a Nutshell received critical praise for her success in bravely capturing family tensions as her eastern heritage clashed with a more western set of values. Take 3 is an accomplished move into short fiction, scrutinising race and gender through the familiar if self-referential lens of casting-couch politics. Three young Kiwi chicks – and it’s important that none of them is actually a first-generation New Zealander – are encouraged to ham up increasingly racist Asian stereotypes during their auditions because of their ethnicities. This chiefly involves playing Lady Snowblood or a coquettish naïf, either chopping through invisible baddies with a bloodcurdling scream, or suggestively sucking a lollipop in hot pants and bobby socks. Initially in competition with each other, the girls end up bonding by subverting a particularly racist group audition brief, pushing the solicited clichés until they explode into chaotic farce and the agent eventually kicks them out.

The title alludes to the film industry of course, but is also a clever nod to the split screens at the beginning and end. While the girls might feel isolated at times and shunted into narrow pigeonholes, they are each utterly absorbing once they leave the auditions – the stars of their own reel and deserving respect as people, not fantasies. The acting talent (Li-Ming Hu, Katlyn Wong, Michelle Ang) will probably be familiar to local audiences and they clearly enjoyed their roles, but Liang again shows a sense of humour and a strong vision as she addresses the expectations and challenges that the descendents of immigrants still have to face in the parochial backwater of little old Nu Zild. The only problem with Take 3 was the plausibility – what kind of casting agent would actually pull faces and demonstrate what he meant by an “Asian accent”, let alone use such a phrase? Banana Split might have been a better title for a film that occasionally skidded across the line when it came to laying on the slapstick and shtick.


Apron Strings covers much of the same ground as Liang’s oeuvre, but while there are some genuinely funny moments Urale offers no neat or artificial conclusions. The chief theme in Apron Strings is the endless capacity for harm in the politics, pride and blinkered self-denial where family relationships and cultural differences cross. Tolerance and forgiveness are alien to a bunch of characters that might have been very difficult to sympathise with if the stories weren’t so tragically familiar and the acting so earnest and convincing.

Temperatures flare on a bustling Otahuhu street where a curry house and a Vietnamese bakery sit alongside an old-fashioned boutique specialising in wedding cakes. Widowed biddy Verna is a throwback to the dour values of the colonial past, stubbornly refusing to sell her wedding-themed shop just so neighbouring immigrants can expand. Along with the dry roast dinners and bone china tea sets, Verna just can’t let go of her past, which has seen her take in and support her thirty-something son Barry, a layabout with enormous debts, who gambles and drinks away any cash that might come his way.

Down the road, Tara appears happy running an Indian restaurant single-handed, but the bitter spinster harbours a hidden wound, having never forgiven her now-estranged sister for bringing dishonour and shame to the family. In contrast sister Anita’s career has taken off as a spiced-up domestic goddess and celebrity chef of international renown. Her return to Auckland is particularly difficult for her son Michael, who secretly searches out Auntie Tara so he can reconnect with the Sikh part of his family that he has never known. Of course the jig is quickly up, leaving Tara feeling only more betrayed and alone by her family.

Urale captures the essence of cooking as a sensuous pleasure, an expression of national identity, and a strong domestic adhesive. The flipside is the violence of food preparation – witness the cutaways to close-up hands mashing, kneading and chopping – which can also expose cultural differences. Tara sees Barry as a charity case, so she feeds him every night, but Barry’s refusal to eat his mother’s laborious though bland meals is only one of the ways he hurts her. When Verna’s prodigal daughter Virginia returns from the successful OE in England with a large baby bump, she too abstains from the traditional stodgy British fare, baffling her poor mother with seaweed flakes, macrobiotics and an hilarious and original twist on the absent father storyline.

Jennifer Ludlam is especially compelling as the desperately sad matriarch ill-equipped to deal with her son’s incorrigible problems and unable to expunge the terrible guilt she assumed two decades ago after a traumatic family tragedy. Equally, once you swallow that Laila Rouass and Leela Patel are sisters, the complexity and nuances behind each strong performance are hard to miss. Strong male figures are conspicuously absent in Apron Strings and the cross-cultural framework highlights the similarities facing independent women regardless of race or society. Like Take 3, Apron Strings is ultimately a film about gender as much as ethnicity.

In a few places the boundaries of ostracism and forgiveness are pushed one step too far for this reviewer – Michael’s sexuality for example seemed a little like throwing in the kitchen sink at the end of a sensitive cultural essay. Likewise the mountains of macramé and doilies are hard to take seriously as heavy-handed symbols of Verna’s character and context. (And even the Edmonds Cookbook has a few curry recipes Verna could have poached.) But that’s a little like complaining about the seasoning being too salty or the garnish too gaudy, because the meat of Apron Strings is juicy, well-prepared and ultimately satisfying.

Here’s hoping this excellent programme returns for a long season before the election and that the Vernas and smug Tories of this country – perhaps the most poorly equipped to understand immigration or integration – check it out.

See also:
» Pick & Mix: Homegrown (Programme 1)