Magik and Rose

Herald rating: * * *

Cast: Alison Bruce, Nicola Murphy, Oliver Driver
Director: Vanessa Alexander

Rating: M

Running time: 92 minutes

Opens: Thursday, Rialto

Review: Peter Calder

A full house gave a full-hearted reception to the first festival screening of this, one of only two indigenous features in the past fortnight's celluloid overload.

And with good reason. Slight and sometimes slightly silly, it's nonetheless one of the more beguiling local efforts to make it into cinemas in recent times and it's laced with more than enough good humour and humanity to repay the admission price.

The film was made for a mere $250,000 but there's no sign of parsimony on screen, which is probably a tribute to the experience of producer Larry Parr.

It's handsomely lensed by Fred Renata, though it could have made greater use of some of its West Coast setting - but in any event, most of the action is internal and the story is etched in miniature.

Magik (Bruce) is an itinerant fake gypsy fortuneteller teetering fearfully on the brink of midlife, who arrives in Hokitika where the fact that she's after more than palms to read becomes quickly and quite poignantly clear.

When she runs into Rose, a smalltown wife desperate to conceive, it soon becomes apparent that the two women are joined by a common longing - Rose wants the child she can't have and Magik is looking for part of her past.

Alexander, who also wrote, has a sense of character and plot which would befit a veteran.

Better still, she juggles the pathos and comedy of the storyline - which traverses the highly charged subjects of infertility and adoption - without lapsing into the mawkish on the one hand or the farcical and banal on the other.

It's a considerable achievement, especially since the film's premise seems at times too flimsy to support its considerable superstructure.

That it never topples is in good measure attributable to the unaffected and generous performances of the two leads.

Bruce, in particular, has long been as one of the country's most technically gifted - and underused - actors.

She has a face the camera loves and which, in this role, exudes exactly the required mix of warmth and pain.

She is patient with us, and with herself, taking the time to let the complexity of her feelings through.

Murphy, meanwhile, in the more thankless role, is everyone's idea of a stitched-up smalltown girl who blossoms into the story's big adventure.

The film is not without its faults. The pace slumps slightly in the third quarter and making Magik's campground neighbour (Driver, permanently in his underpants and proud of it) a madcap mathematician as well adds unnecessarily to the confusion.

But, micro budget and all, it's the kind of feelgood affair we all deserve after faithfully sitting through Heaven and Hopeless and Demons and ...

Links:

Magik and Rose Website