Alice (Melanie Lynskey) is bored beyond breaking point by her dull life in South Island suburbia. Raised on a diet of American pop-culture (along with most Kiwi kids) and sick of being the voyeur that TV makes you, she yearns for the sort of excitement she's seen in the movies. To combat life in 'the safest place in the world', Alice has convinced her law student-friend Johnny (Dean O'Gorman) to accompany her on a quest for trouble.
With its roots firmly in trash TV, Gillian Ashurst's script is much closer to the experience of modern New Zealand life than many other recent films have been. Snakeskin could be read as a celebration of the American cultural colonisation which New Zealand, along with most western countries, has experienced. However, within Alice and Johnny's cliched talk of all things American there is an underlying subtext that these characters are comfortably protected in New Zealand from the excesses of American life.
Alice and Johnny spend their spare time driving around in Johnny's red convertible Valiant picking up hitch-hikers. Alice then aggressively quizzes their temporary passengers about the excitement which is to be found overseas. In between hitch-hikers and mock shoot-outs with petrol pump hoses, Johnny attempts to convince Alice to let him be more than a friend.
However all good road movies require two things: an ambiguous strong silent type and a reason to keep travelling. Alice and Johnny find both of these things when they pick up Seth (Boyd Kestner), a real American. Seth is everything that Alice has been looking for, cowboy hat, snakeskin boots and an American accent, but most satisfying of all, Seth is on the run. Finally Alice has the excitement that she always wanted, driving to nowhere pursued by skinheads, hippie drug dealers and a man wanting to avenge his brothers.
With so many stereotypes on display, Snakeskin constantly has to provide twists and turns to prevent itself being overwhelmed by cliche. By setting this film firmly in the South Island, Gillian Ashurst immediately makes Snakeskin a fantasy rather than a run-of-the-mill road movie. Only the character of Seth seems to be truly comfortable treating State Highway 1 as if it were Route 66. All the other characters are aware that drugs, guns, and cars don't result in a road movie when placed in a New Zealand context.
Sparks fly as Johnny competes for Alice's affections, but Seth seems strangely uneffected by the love triangle he finds himself in. Afterall, Seth comes from a mystical chase movie world where your actions don't have any real consequences. While every other character, including the nihilistic skinheads, pause and make decisions based on their repercussions, Seth is a true hedonist, doing whatever he feels like when he feels like doing it.
The realism with which the New Zealand characters act provides a striking balance to the torrent of cliches. This realism is added to by some very smart casting choices. Paul Glover particularly stands out as a believable skinhead. His character is starting to think like an adult, and realises that the insular world of a racist gang can't provide him with what he wants out of life. Similar deft touches are found throughout the script, making Snakeskin much more than the B-films that it was heavily influenced by.
Ashurst's script rides a fine line from beginning to end, almost every bit of dialogue could be perceived as being corny in another context, but in Ashurst's skilled hands they become re-born as something fresh and original.
Even the dope dealers, who come dangerously close to being typical American comic relief, are saved by a mixture of great acting (by Taika Cohen and Jodie Rimmer) and a believable sub-plot.
Perhaps the real sign that this is a truly New Zealand movie is the fact that so much of the script relies on an understanding of Australasian characters. For audiences with little knowledge of New Zealand, Snakeskin will probably be perceived as a quirky chase film. While New Zealand audiences will laugh at lines such as 'This isn't America, you can't just shoot somebody,' unlike foreign audiences they will laugh knowing that for many New Zealanders the line rings true. Perhaps the most clever and admirable aspect of Ashurst's script is that it plays with New Zealand stereotypes as much as American stereotypes.
By presenting audiences with a typical New Zealand view of American culture: violent, uncaring and soulless, Ashurst exposes this worldview as absurd. But more importantly Snakeskin is at pains to show New Zealand is not, as we so often think, boring, conservative, and above all safe.
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Snakeskin Review by Russell Baillie, The New Zealand Herald
(Herald rating: * * * * ) If the powers-that-be are worried about the influence that American street racing flick The Fast and The Furious will have on local hoons, then hopefully they could pay this stylishly outlandish Kiwi feature a similar compliment by getting in a lather about its risque content.
Here, after all, is a movie which contains bad driving, taking and dealing most of the drugs which make up the Kiwi pharmaceutical spectrum, playing with guns, having sex in pub bathrooms, racist violence and a few other elements to spice up its sense of danger.
Though, thankfully, director Gillian Ashurst's debut - and Melanie Lynskey's second New Zealand feature after Heavenly Creatures - isn't about all that stuff.
It's largely a successful attempt at grafting the lore of the American road movie to a wild one-day ride across the South Island from the Canterbury plains to the West Coast.
If it doesn't quite sustain the energy it starts with, it still manages to be one wild ride, a heady mix of fantasy and culture clash.
It's also a grown-up vehicle for Lynskey, who has been based stateside. Her performance makes the scatterbrained Alice plausible and oddly alluring.
Alice is a suburban girl with a head full of Americana, who's only relief from backwater drudgery is going for long drives with her seemingly platonic and sensible friend Johnny (Dean O'Gorman) in his big red convertible Valiant.
One day, they encounter the Marlboro man-like Seth (Boyd Kestner), who soon proves no ordinary American tourist. Because of their dangerous new acquaintance, the trio are being variously pursued by a ute full of speed-snorting, softball bat-wielding skinheads (led by Oliver Driver, who makes a convincing neo-Nazi nasty) and a pair of dope dealers in a smoke-laden My Whippy van.
Meanwhile, catalyzed by some lysergic dalliances, the sexual tensions inside the Valiant slowly reach boiling point.
It throws in a few amusing allusions to Goodbye Pork Pie along the way, while its cinematography - enhanced by some seamless computer animation - neatly blends all that lovely down-country scenery with Alice's mental wonderland into a picture that looks rather more expensive than it probably was.
Whether this road movie will prove as bad an influence on this generation as Goodbye Pork Pie did on mine, remains to be seen. But you live in hope.
Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Dean O'Gorman, Boyd Kestner, Oliver Driver
Director: Gillian Ashurst
Rating: R16 (violence, offensive language, drug use, sex scenes)
Running time: 92 mins
Snakeskin was #19 on the Herald's list of Top 20 Movies of 2001.
SNAKESKIN (2001)
