The American indie house style has landed in the land of the long white cloud. All the warning signs are here: pastel colours, quirky characters, flat compositions, old-school animation (in this case claymation and pixilation), a soundtrack recorded by an independent rock band, and a story about a couple of twenty-somethings who haven't quite grown up yet. It reeks of Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite and Me and You and Everyone We Know. It could turn out to be a disaster. But somehow, Eagle vs Shark, which is screening today at GoMA's Australian Cinematheque, manages to avoid becoming another self-absorbed foray into pseudo-sentimentality or cynical hipsterism. It does so not by virtue of its unfortunately derivative style, but through the force of Loren Horsley's genuinely heart-warming performance as Lily, an awkward, lovelorn fast-food employee, and by the fact that it refuses to stop itself from going somewhere genuinely disturbing at its most crucial moment. Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement plays Horsley's love interest, Jarrod, with the same monotonous deadpan and misplaced self-regard that he brought to his television character, though the content here is much darker than in the series and his character significantly more unlikeable. (It would be interesting to conduct a survey to see how many male filmmakers were desperate and dateless when they were growing up and how many have since fulfilled their adolescent fantasies by making films in which adorable women fall head over heels for unattractive men-children.) The debut feature of the exciting young New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, whose love for his characters was first on show in the Oscar-nominated short Two Cars, One Night, Eagle vs Shark does well to avoid the ironic postmodernism and thinly-veiled cynicism of the films whose style it so needlessly apes, and one hopes that now, having done the whole indiewood thing, Waititi might get down to the delicate business of developing a cinematic language all of his own.

Review, 15 May 2010