'We Were Dangerous' Punches Well Above Its Weight

Sunday, 25 August 2024, 2:24 pm
Article: Howard Davis

We Were Dangerous is a slight, but highly impressive film that becomes more powerful as it progresses. A searing indictment of New Zealand’s repressive patriarchal system in the early 1950s, it depicts the trials and tribulations of a small number of adolescent girls who were deemed incorrigibly rebellious and sent to an uninhabited island to be ‘reformed’ into docile, child-bearing wives valued only for reproductive purposes. It turns out even that this option was made out of reach for some young women.

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu directs a strong cast of mostly non-professional actors who perfectly capture the joys, fears, and frustrations of three of these ‘delinquent’ girls and explores the conflicted mindset of their domineering Maori matron, played by the wonderful Roma Te Wiata (Hunt For The Wilderpeople).

In an era when conservative Kiwis, spurred on by such incipient American cultural imports as rock-and-roll and drug taking, were growing increasingly alarmed by what was considered the louche, licentious, and irreligious behaviour of teenagers, Maddie Dai’s screenplay reveals the shocking extremes which were employed to ‘rehabilitate’ such disruptive and antisocial troublemakers. With an open ending that keeps audiences guessing (and sometimes gasping with indignation), it is an insightful and sympathetic portrait of sisterhood under some of the most prejudiced, discriminatory, sexist and racist conditions imaginable.

To their everlasting shame, such coercive sects as the Gloriavale Community still promote the Biblical injuncture to “spare the rod and spoil the child,” fallaciously believing that “the most dangerous place in the world is the womb of an ungodly woman.” Despite the current coalition government’s attempts to reverse the social progress made over the past few decades, much of the civilised world has abolished corporal punishment, leaving only the exhausted jets of superstitious ignorance floating in its wake (which is literally how these feisty girls manage to escape from captivity, albeit temporarily).

Sadly, as this insightful and solicitous movie makes clear, many organised religious institutions and other delusional cults that offer only a punitive pathway to salvation still have a lot of issues for which they must atone.

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Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz