Busy medic Briar (Loren Taylor, also behind the camera) is late picking up her long-distance Skype boyfriend, Tim (Robbie Magasiva), with his ”Happy Mother’s Day” balloon, the only heart-shaped option at the airport.
They pull over by the side of the lonely road and kick out luggage for a backseat fumble that begins with butt cramp and ends in premature ejaculation and an unexpected period.
Move over, American Pie. With The Moon Is Upside Down, Taylor makes a striking directorial debut, featuring a strong contender for cinema’s clumsiest sex scene.
Taylor, best known for cowriting and starring in Eagle vs Shark with Taika Waititi, her former partner, deservedly won the best-first-feature award at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for this quietly moving and darkly funny triptych of stories.
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Where Eagle vs Shark mined the comic potential of socially awkward love amid fast-food counters and video arcades, The Moon Is Upside Down finds emotional gravitas on the dustier backroads and dead-end motels of far-flung Wellington.
The unabashedly feminine and poignantly awkward dramedy intertwines the lives of three women – a hopeful Russian immigrant, a weary anaesthetist and a jaded housewife – each grappling with their own crisis.
Natalia (Victoria Haralabidou) arrives in New Zealand expecting a fresh start and a chance to run a cafe, only to find her new life with Mac (a hilariously uncomfortable Jemaine Clement) is surrounded by doomed cows. Briar half-arsedly navigates her “erotic” virtual relationship between hospital shifts. And Faith (Elizabeth Hawthorne), a woman of privilege and routine, is jolted into action when she discovers a dead tenant in one of her husband’s rental properties.
The characters talk more than the denizens of Aki Kaurismäki’s similarly deadpan milieu, but the tone is of a piece: “Selling a property with a dead person in it,” Faith says, “it’s like buying a jacket with an arm in it. It has nothing to do with me. Did I tell you the canary starved to death?”
Taylor’s fearless and tart script is jollied along by mordant humour, winning performances and bracing realism. It’s a dark comedy with the same offbeat sensibility as the New Zealand favourites Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and it points to a bright future for the writer-director.
On limited cinema release from Friday, June 27th
