The Moon Is Upside Down: This poignantly awkward dramedy could feature cinema's clumsiest sex scene
The Moon is Upside Down
Director
:
Loren Taylor
Cert
:
None
Genre
:
Comedy
Starring
:
Starring Victoria Haralabidou, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Loren Taylor, Robbie Magasiva, Robyn Malcolm, Rachel House, Jemaine Clement
Running Time
:
1 hr 40 mins
Busy medic Briar (Loren Taylor, also behind the camera) is late picking up her long-distance Skype boyfriend, Tim (Robbie Magasiva), with his 'Happy Mother's Day' balloon, the only heart-shaped option at the airport.
They pull over by the side of the lonely road and kick out luggage for a backseat fumble that begins with butt cramp and ends in premature ejaculation and an unexpected period.
Move over, American Pie. With The Moon Is Upside Down, Taylor makes a striking directorial debut, featuring a strong contender for cinema's clumsiest sex scene.
Taylor, best known for cowriting and starring in Eagle vs Shark with Taika Waititi, her former partner, deservedly won the best-first-feature award at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for this quietly moving and darkly funny triptych of stories.
READ MORE
Where Eagle vs Shark mined the comic potential of socially awkward love amid fast-food counters and video arcades, The Moon Is Upside Down finds emotional gravitas on the dustier backroads and dead-end motels of far-flung Wellington.
The unabashedly feminine and poignantly awkward dramedy intertwines the lives of three women – a hopeful Russian immigrant, a weary anaesthetist and a jaded housewife – each grappling with their own crisis.
Natalia (Victoria Haralabidou) arrives in New Zealand expecting a fresh start and a chance to run a cafe, only to find her new life with Mac (a hilariously uncomfortable Jemaine Clement) is surrounded by doomed cows. Briar half-arsedly navigates her 'erotic' virtual relationship between hospital shifts. And Faith (Elizabeth Hawthorne), a woman of privilege and routine, is jolted into action when she discovers a dead tenant in one of her husband's rental properties.
The characters talk more than the denizens of Aki Kaurismäki's similarly deadpan milieu, but the tone is of a piece: 'Selling a property with a dead person in it,' Faith says, 'it's like buying a jacket with an arm in it. It has nothing to do with me. Did I tell you the canary starved to death?'
Taylor's fearless and tart script is jollied along by mordant humour, winning performances and bracing realism. It's a dark comedy with the same offbeat sensibility as the New Zealand favourites Boy and
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
, and it points to a bright future for the writer-director.
On limited cinema release from Friday, June 27th
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