16 - A Māori Boy Contests the Old Patriarchal Order: Mahana (Lee Tamahori, 2016)

Summary

When one looks at the sequence of films showing Māori coming-of-age experiences, beginning with Merata Mita's Mauri (1988), continuing with Lee Tamahori's Once Were Warriors (1994) and Niki Caro's Whale Rider (2002), and attaining a spectacular flowering in Boy (Taika Waititi, 2010), Mahana (released overseas under the title The Patriarch [Lee Tamahori, 2016]), and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (Taika Waititi, 2016), a distinct pattern becomes apparent. Mauri, following the approach advocated by Barry Barclay in his vision for a ‘fourth cinema,’ adopted a kaupapa Māori approach (that is, one that was informed by the attitudes, principles, and values of Māori society) to the telling of a story in which Māori tikanga (cultural practices) were observed to the letter. Once Were Warriors, also a film about Māori, directed by a Māori, and with Māori actors, depicted, to the contrary, a group of people living in an urban context completely deracinated from their customary culture until one of them, Beth, rediscovered its sustaining values and decided to return to her marae. Boy, on the other hand, presented that culture as having undergone a transformation even in the rural tribal homelands, with the incursion of popular American culture being embraced enthusiastically by the local youths. Mahana continues that trend, revealing a similar kind of cultural hybridity involving the assimilation of American culture, but also trying to match it with a strict observance of tikanga Māori, to an extent that was conspicuously absent in Whale Rider and, to a lesser extent, in Boy. What we see in this pattern are reflections of a culture in the process of change, and, for that reason, it is useful to explore how the forces promoting this change intersect in this very recent film, Mahana, which is particularly useful for this purpose because it has been made by a Māori filmmaker whose own personal itinerary reflects a response to those very same forces. Before teasing out the factors involved in that itinerary, however, it is necessary to consider the relationship between Tamahori's film and the novel by Witi Ihimaera from which it was adapted.