By Jake Wilson
HEAD SOUTH
Written and directed by Jonathan Ogilvie
99 minutes, rated MA
★★★½
Some aspects of growing up are perennial. Others are more specific to a particular era, like the thrill of getting an obscure record mailed to you from overseas, followed by the bitter discovery it’s warped.
This is among the first of many misfortunes to befall Angus (Ed Oxenbould), the hapless hero of Jonathan Ogilvie’s nostalgic teen movie Head South, set in Christchurch at the end of the 1970s.
Ed Oxenbould is a mild-mannered New Zealand sort of punk.
When Angus does get to listen to the debut single from John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, his world changes, as the film signals by shifting to widescreen. Before long, he’s ditching his shaggy haircut for short back and sides, adding staples to his school uniform and dreaming about starting a band.
He’s a very New Zealand sort of punk, apologising that his hair isn’t all it should be (“I’m trying to get it to stick up more”). He also can’t stop smiling – partly from anxiety, but also from mingled joy and relief at having found his tribe.
As it turns out, everyone on the local scene is a poseur of one sort or another. If anything, the coolest guy in sight is Angus’ morose but kindly dad Gordon (the versatile veteran Marton Csokas), with his tweed suits and a voice that could be used to advertise whisky.
Angus himself is a comparably unexpected mix of traits, a gormless innocent who might still have some potential as a stage performer along Ian Curtis lines (Oxenbould, an Australian who became an internationally known child star a decade ago, is an actor to look out for).
A New Zealander who has worked a good deal in Australia, Ogilvie has had an odd, mostly under-the-radar career, combining a furtive temperament with a fondness for gimmicks. Such gimmicks aren’t absent here, ranging from visual tricks such as jump cuts and film burn effects to the convoluted metaphor alluded to in the title.
Still, this is the film where Ogilvie shows what he really has in him. You don’t have to know he started out in the 1980s directing music videos for Christchurch’s Flying Nun label – which gets a shout-out here – to deduce that portions of Angus’ story must be autobiographical.
Likewise, you don’t have to be an expert on the period to recognise the film is crammed with details too specific not to be accurate, including many unconnected with the punk milieu, such as the Janet Frame novel that Angus’ arty eventual bandmate Kirsten (New Zealand pop star Benee) is reading behind the counter of the local chemist.
Also autobiographical by Ogilvie’s account is the ending, which features one of the oddest tonal shifts I can recall seeing. His choice to save this particular plot development up to the last minute has something evasive about it – but equally, his refusal to make Head South a straightforward feelgood entertainment suggests he has some of the old punk spirit left.
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