The Map Reader

Herald rating:

* *

Verdict:

Coming of age tale loses direction despite map skills.

The Map Reader

has some nice ideas to it. The main one, about a small town teenager whose life-long fascination with maps springs from a desire to locate an absent father but also makes him somehow reluctant to explore the real world, sounds inspired.

But like so many self-produced local digital features of recent times, this labour of love soon becomes laborious because while it's got enough creative spark for a short film, it can't fuel a feature-sized bonfire.

Instead its rites-of-passage story about 16-year-old Helensville-resident map geek Michael (Selwyn) is weighed down by layers of melodrama, some uneven performances - the main one being Gibney as Michael's sozzled-but-ever-jolly solo mum - and too many scenes that seem to exist only to make up the running time.

The New Zealand Film Commission only chipped in as far as script development on this one's $225,000 budget - and though its digital cinematography looks like a zero was added to that - its storytelling and characters can't sustain the interest.

As well as friction with his mum, Michael's rites of passage involve Mary, a free-spirited (though coming across as slightly daffy) blind woman a few years older than him (Soper); Alison (Hutchinson) the troubled girl next door; and his boorish schoolmates. They all swing in and out of frame while he broods about, well, something in that teenage angsty head of his.

Director-writer Brodie, on his second digital feature after the largely unloved

Orphans and Angels

certainly puts his leading man through his paces. Every couple of minutes it seems Selwyn is seen running flat-out from one end of town to another for reasons unclear.

A later and slightly confusing scene, however, of a younger Michael running a kite over the hills of Kaipara Heads, is so visually lovely you might wonder why it wasn't the opening sequence where the confusion it induces might have been better employed.

It's true that Selwyn has a genuine screen presence and that Hutchinson also shines as Alison, even when she's dealing with the film's slightly ridiculous climax. That scene involves a brief performance by Michael Hurst as her father, whose cameos now seem compulsory to local flicks of good intentions but dubious appeal.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Rebecca Gibney, Jordan Selwyn, Mikaila Hutchinson, Bonnie Soper

Director:

Harold Brodie

Rating:

M (violence and sexual references)

Running time:

90 mins

Screening:

Rialto