By Sandra Hall
TINA
★★★★
M. 124 minutes. In cinemas May 1
Mareta Percival is the first Polynesian teacher to work at St Francis Assisi, an elite Christchurch private school, and its deputy head does not approve, which doesn’t bother Mareta at all.
Mareta with her young charges.
Stout in every sense of the word, she proudly declares her Samoan identity with the boldly patterned dresses she wears to school, the flower in her hair and her ambitions for her class. She forms a school choir and coaxes its slightly bemused teenage members into learning Samoan songs with the aim of competing in a national contest.
The film was written and directed by Samoa’s Miki Magasiva, who was inspired both by the Samoan women who brought him up and a college choir he heard six years ago. With an engaging lack of pretension, he calls it “a light-hearted, rhythmic tear-jerker”, which is fair enough. Its villains are irredeemable caricatures, its feelgood factor is at the top of the range and the music produced by the choir, when it finally gets it act together, is joyous.
Mareta (Anapela Polataivao) comes to the school in the wake of tragedy. After the death of her daughter, a talented singer on the verge of a big career, she gives up teaching music to disadvantaged Polynesian children and hibernates. It’s only when she’s on the brink of losing her welfare payments that she agrees to apply for a job. And it’s only because St Francis’s school board is so clearly prejudiced against her that she takes it. As it happens, its principal, Alan Hubbard (Dalip Sondhi) is more enlightened than his deputy.
It would be wrong to characterise her as an underdog. She’s hit bottom with her daughter’s death and the knowledge that she has nothing more to lose is all the armour she needs. She wastes no words and makes no concessions whether she’s talking to the kids or her increasingly smarmy antagonist, Mr Wadsworth, played a little too convincingly by Jamie Irvine.
And he’s not the only one who doesn’t like what she’s doing. Her best friend, Rona (Nicole Whippy), who worked with her when she was teaching Samoan kids, can’t understand why she’s abandoned them for white teens who want for nothing.
Mareta has already discovered the flaws in that assumption. The kids she’s teaching are having to deal with the usual assortment of adolescent anxieties – from the unreasonable demands of their overbearing parents to the torments inflicted by the school bullies. And Sophie (Antonia Robinson), the most gifted of them all, has depression – a hangover from a trauma we will learn about as time goes on.
Nonetheless, there is room for laughter as the kids gradually become familiar with Mareta’s habit of saying exactly what she thinks whatever the circumstances. Her refusal to be intimidated is unshakeable. In fact, taunting the stitched-up school board with her unorthodox teaching methods and her terse one-liners could well be her favourite pastime.
It’s not exactly a smooth path to success for the choir. Like all feelgood movies, this one factors in a strategic selection of obstacles and reversals but there’s never any doubt that Mareta will prevail. She’s a great character. Polataivao brings her to life with an ease that suggests she’s stepped off the street and on to the screen without noticing the camera’s presence. And the teens respond to her with the same lack of self-consciousness.
It is certainly a tear-jerker. It’s not going to surprise you by taking off into uncharted narrative territory but it’s the kind of tear-jerker which never loses touch with reality. Nor is it out to instruct you in how to feel. It’s a gem.
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