Monday new releases: 1 July 2024

Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End, The Taste of Things, Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One are in cinemas, The Royal Hotel is a digital rental or Blu, Remembering Gene Wilder is on Netflix

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Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End is not the first time that the pivotal 1864 siege of Ōrākau during the New Zealand Wars has been portrayed on film. Pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward told it as Rewi’s Last Stand twice – once as a silent film in 1925 and again with sound in 1940.

The te reo Māori word whakapapa is strictly defined as genealogy or lineage but I have heard it used in different modern contexts – rather than a personal line of descent it can be used to outline the descent of an idea, a purpose, a philosophy. In that sense, then, Ka Whaiwahi Tonu whakapapas back (I’ve also heard the word used as a verb like this) through Aotearoa cinema history (including Geoff Murphy’s Utu) and Māori screen representation, a perfect example of how Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) travels forward in time while simultaneously looking back towards the past.

The Rewi of Rewi’s Last Stand is Rewi Maniapoto, chief of Ngāti Maniapoto. In the new film he is played by local legend Temuera Morrison. His forces have been driven back by the colonial army and they are stuck in an unpromising position. Reinforcements have arrived from other tribes and they are desperate to engage – not to waste all that energy and all their weapons – but Maniapoto argues for a retreat over certain defeat, the only way he believes they might keep their land.

He loses that argument and hurried arrangements are made to defend the Ōrākau Pa before the colonial army arrives.

We see most of this through the eyes of two fictional characters – young folk. Haki or Jack (Paku Fernandez) has been taken prisoner. A child soldier with an English father (Jason Flemyng), he’s looking for a way out and to find his dead mother’s family. Also trapped in a role they do not want is Kopu (Hinerangi Harawira-Nicholas). She’s a medium, a channel to the gods, but it is her mother’s ambition that drives that choice of career.

These two bond as the battle begins and it is largely they who we follow as the tragedy of Ōrākau unfolds.

Tim Worrall’s script is unafraid to consider the many contradictions of Māori society of the time, the differences of political opinion as well as the different rates of adoption of pākehā ways and technologies. But it also makes clear that – 24 years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the position of Māori in colonial New Zealand is desperate.

Michael Jonathan, the director, is a screen veteran but this is his first feature film and it is a robust and effective action film. The pacing is excellent, with plenty of lulls in the battle for us to focus on the characters, but when the fighting starts it is thrillingly shot.

A much more sedate experience is The Taste of Things, a quick return from the successful French Film Festival.

Based on a hundred-year-old novel, in turn set thirty-odd years before the being published, the film is about the relationship between gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) and his cook/assistant (and lover) Eugénie (Juliette Binoche).

Yes, it’s about food – lovingly, respectfully, gorgeously presented food – but it is also about love across the class divide. Eugénie repeatedly refuses Bouffant’s proposals of marriage but not his entry to her bedroom. They are a perfect partnership in the kitchen but she does not believe that she can be his equal in life. She chooses not to share his table when they cook extraordinary, extended, meals for his friends.