Twilight of the Gods

This was an assigned viewing for my university's New Zealand film course. I knew nothing about it except for the title, and let me tell you, this was absolutely not what I was expecting. Whatever impression the title gives you, it's really about the bond between a Maori warrior and a British soldier who meet in the jungle. There's not much dialogue or explanation to give context to this bond as it is displayed quite visually.

I found this short film on a DVD called "The Best of Boys in Love," and it was the only really moving short film on the disc. Made in New Zealand, it's the story of a native hunter who nurses a wounded western soldier back to health, alone in a jungle. I don't know anything about New Zealand history or culture. But you don't have to in order to understand what's going on. The two characters don't share a language, culture, values, or loyalties, but they form a bond nevertheless. A really well-trimmed, simple story that doesn't sacrifice any depth.

Game like lovebird, game like love...

That the director manages so adroitly to handle his material suffusing narrative with anthropological commentary, erotic sarcasm with a post-colonial sense of no exit, and the simple male-to-male recognition while preserving the important sense of inherent antagonism, usually depicted (if at all!) as antagonism between the sexes rather than between the lovers as such, is nothing less than a singular achievement. The maker of this short knows how to make love stay outside agendas.

The raw import of the love between the two men, and how its shortness is accessed, by making the two men's otherness elliptic (and perhaps more cunningly the white male's, so that his opaqueness in the end rhymes with white guilt and delirious beauty - the glimpse of his erection -, and makes Toa's chirpy talkativeness a sad affair in the end), must make it some sort of a legend.

Lovebird chirps is the name of the game, love plays the game, and love is the prey of gods.

...is the lead virtue of this film . A simple story , nudity, dramatic end of a sort of friendship behind cultures, traditions and rules. Poetic in profound sense, it is one well crafted short films, reminding the source of deep vulnerability, giving a touching love story, proposing a seductive film in skin of ethnological documentary. Its delicate grace remains the fundamental virtue.