Reviewed by Mike Crowl
On Easter Sunday a couple of years ago, we watched a film crew transform part of one of Dunedin's inner city streets into war-time Wellington. The film, (then going by a different name) was The Last Tattoo. The huge amount of effort that went into that day's work appears on the screen for perhaps less than thirty seconds. On top of that, anything up to two years of some people's lives has been taken up with this New Zealand-made movie. A pity then that all the time and effort seems wasted on a fairly unsavoury subject: the checking of venereal diseases amongst prostitutes, during the war-time invasion of New Zealand by marines on leave.
The film is supposed to be a romantic thriller,in which the main character, Kelly Towne, (played with passion, and plenty of heroics, by Kerry Fox of An Angel at My Table), gradually discovers that diseases of the heart are much more difficult to deal with than those of the body. Along the way she falls in love with her American counterpart, Capt Starwood, played by Tony Goldwyn. Kelly upstages Capt Starwood whenever there are any heroics so that he almost ends up being a romantic wimp.
Their love story is played out against a violent background: the film starts with a vicious murder and is often ugly throughout. Most of the characters manage to be foul-mouthed in the usual modern film fashion, though I suspect speech between men and women in that time was rather more decent than is presented here. Some of the characters' conversation leaves little to the imagination. On top of all this, script-writer, Keith Aberdien, has taken the trendy deconstruction path: what happens, and how people speak, is filtered through with nineties' thinking. Kelly Towne is a nineties feminist anachronistically living in the forties.
Justice and integrity do manage to get a look in, but much of the film remains amoral in tone. I don't recommend it at all. You might feel it's a pity to miss out on seeing how the makers transformed Crawford St, the Savoy restaurant, and the King Edward Technical College, but the ugliness played out in front of them is hardly worth the price of your admission ticket.
copyright 1997 Mike Crowl
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