Apron Strings

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Slightly laboured but heartfelt Kiwi melodrama about a young man's troubling decision to explore his Indian roots.

The role of food in expressing and shaping cultural identity has long been a preoccupation of this film's co-writer, Shuchi Kothari, on whose original idea it is based. But in asking the idea to sustain a dramatic feature, she stretches it a little more than is comfortable.

Apron Strings

is, to use its own idiom, overspiced, but the taste is not as rich as it should be and is ultimately a little unsatisfying.

This is not to say it is devoid of pleasures, many of them rather tasty.

What's more, it is imbued with a refreshing, distinctly feminine sensibility which recognises that, in real life, resolution occurs more often in small, barely perceptible steps than with major dramatic crises and Big Speeches. But it's hard not to conclude that it's a lesser movie as a result.

The two parallel and occasionally intersecting storylines concern mothers and their sons (the absence of fathers hints at one of the great social malaises of our age, a more widespread form of deracination, perhaps, than the immigrant experience). Lorna (Ludlam) is the proprietor of a classic Kiwi cake kitchen in a part of town whose ethnic makeup, to her distinct chagrin, is changing. Her son Barry (Wills) is a 35-year-old layabout loser, living at home and sponging off Mum, who is also under pressure from a creditor.

Elsewhere, the gorgeous Anita (Rouass, from

Footballers Wives

) is the host of an Indian cooking show on TV (never mind that she doesn't much like Indians or even Indian food) whose carefully constructed life starts to crumble when her son Michael (Whitaker), begins to explore his Indian roots and gets a job in an authentic curry house. But this is not just any curry house.

There's a slightly plodding deliberateness to this set-up, although the film carries it off with more aplomb than that outline suggests. The script's insistence on constantly underlining its Key Points and explicating characters' interior lives ("You don't know what it's been like not knowing about a whole side of my life!") is faintly insulting too. But as overwrought as it is, it's like a classy soap opera, set in a multicultural New Zealand seldom seen on screen.

Thanks to Rewa Harre's luscious camerawork, it certainly looks mouth-watering (if you go on an empty stomach, you won't get through the opening credits) and the cast is more than competent, though the excellent Ludlam is the only one of whom we always believe there is more than meets the eye, and her experience gives the film much-needed gravitas. (A bouquet, too, for the evergreen Kate Harcourt as Lorna's mum; she shows the youngsters a thing or two about line-reading).

With a bit of luck, it will be the first of many movies that grapple with our changing ethnic identity. If only for that reason, and for all its faults, it deserves attention.

Peter Calder 

Cast:

Laila Rouass, Scott Wills, Jennifer Ludlam, Nathan Whitaker, Leela Patel, Jodie Rimmer

Director:

Vaele Sima Urale

Running time:

89 mins

Rating:

M (contains violence & offensive language).

Screening:

Berkeley Botany Downs, Bridgeway, Hoyts Sylvia Park, Matakana, SkyCity (Albany, St Lukes, Highland Park), Rialto Newmarket