Film review: As our movies keep reminding us, a Christchurch adolescence can be a difficult thing. If it’s not matricidal tendencies in Heavenly Creatures or latent witchiness in The Changeover, now in Head South, it’s the DIY allure of punk rock and post-punk in the city of 1979.
Writer and director Jonathan Ogilvie was a part of this era and he has semi-autobiographically recreated it in his fourth feature, a charming, funny, coming-of-age rock flick.
It arrives with the jagged edges and prickly energy of the era it celebrates mostly intact. It also captures the life-changing thrill of a teenager finding the music that speaks to him, then goes through the ritual of joining the tribe that goes with it.
Along the way, Head South does suffer from some tone control wobbles, and it ends somewhere far more serious than anything earlier suggested. It also has story strands that feel like old yarns about Ogilvie’s youthful adventures that he felt he had to include, despite leading to some narrative dead ends.
But the performances are terrific, as is a soundtrack that mixes post-punk blasts from the likes of Public Image Limited, Wire, Magazine and Ogilvie’s old band YFC, with a new score by Shayne Carter.
Away from the musical backdrop, it’s also a bittersweet, unpredictable father-and-son drama. Márton Csókás is great as the perplexed father to Angus (Ed Oxenbould). Newly separated from his wife, he has bigger problems than a newly spiky-haired offspring thrashing the hi-fi and liberating his old winklepickers from the bottom of the wardrobe.
Young Aussie actor Oxenbould is compelling as the awkward, introverted Angus who, after hearing PiL, finds himself joining the post-punk DIY revolution on self-taught bass. He recruits chemist shop assistant Kirsten on guitar (singer Benee, assured, dry of delivery and underused). An emboldened Angus is also pursuing the attentions of enigmatic scenester Holly (Roxie Mohebbi), possibly unwisely.
Despite the then-and-now limitations of depicting Christchurch in 1979, Head South is certainly evocative of the place and time. In its production design, it’s a movie of trainspotter-pleasing touches – the distinctive Jansen teardrop guitar played by Benee’s character looks to be (given the credits thank-you) borrowed from the Bats’ Kaye Woodward. The battered Fender bass that Angus covets is Ogilvie’s. There’s at least one nod to Stanley Kubrick, whose 1987 Full Metal Jacket a then UK-based Ogilvie worked on doing special effects, in the window of the record shop pivotal to the story. And there’s Len Lye-inspired scratched-film titles.
Our leftfield music history has had plenty of fine docos in past years. Head South may be fiction, but it captures its own weird times with a comparable authenticity and vitality.
Rating out of five: ★★★★
Head South, directed by Jonathan Ogilvie, is out now.
