Word: zealander
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...photographer (Matthew Macfadyen) the movie charts, the film's biggest surprise is how far it strays from the book. Neither Celia's poem, the lunar landscape of Central Otago, or indeed the war photographer exists in the novel. For lovers of Gee's taut prose (they include New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, who last month honored the author with an Award for Literary Achievement), the real mystery of this crime story might well be: where's the book...
...years since In My Father's Den became a Kiwi classic. The book's cool, ironic narrator Paul Prior, an English teacher rebelling against his religious upbringing, embodied the tough outsider of New Zealand literature, starting with John Mulgan's 1939 novel Man Alone. When Gee began writing the book in the late '60s, "we were able to shake off that oppressive Puritanism," the author, 73, recalls, "which wasn't only religious, it was secular." Novels like Gee's award-winning Plumb (1978), based on the life of his Presbyterian minister turned Communist grandfather James Chapple, continued that shaking...
...That McGann did - not just flipping the action to New Zealand's South Island, whose dark, claustrophobic peaks he thought best reflected the story's mood, but ending the film where the book begins: uncovering the body of a murdered schoolgirl. Instead, the film is concerned with a different kind of discovery: what happens when a man returns home after 17 years abroad to find an old girlfriend (Jodie Rimmer) whose wildly imaginative daughter might just be his. In this sense, McGann remains true to the book: In My Father's Den is about the sexual charge that can dance...
...explore these shadowlands. With Possum, his award-winning 1996 short, the filmmaker, trained at Melbourne's Swinburne school, found improbable lightness in the dark fable of a boy and his autistic sister at the turn of last century. With Father's Den, he sets a match to New Zealand's "cinema of unease," the phrase coined by Sam Neill to describe the country's love affair with darkness. "I need a cigarette to cope with this kind of scenery," says Paul at one point. So, too, might audience-goers, so slowly and inexorably are they pulled into McGann...
...Manhattan, Payne tells the sommelier that we have no time for bubbles or even whites. When the bartender tops off Payne's 2002 Drystone Pinot Noir from New Zealand, Payne pours half of it into my glass, eager to move on to the next red. It's a 2001 Pintas from Douro, Portugal, and he likes it. A lot. He immediately starts to think about what food to match it with. "Wine is to food as music is to film," Payne says. "If the combination is right, then it's a whole new thing...