I come to The Last Saint knowing one thing: Beulah Koale’s in it. That’s good. I’ve only seen him before in the first episode of TV3 crime drama Harry, playing a desperate drug addict who carries out a fatal armed robbery. (I didn't finish the series.) Playing the focal point of many of his scenes, Koale struck me as an actor of great honesty and vulnerability, the episode’s most compelling performer (and Sam Neill was in that show, even if he was on autopilot).
That role made me a fan of Beulah Koale. I want people to give him great work. And he’s been getting great work – Massive Company’s The Brave, Victor Rodger’s Black Faggot, a small role in Fantail. Fantail aside, though, I haven’t been able to see that great work. That great work’s in Auckland. I’m in Dunedin.
So of course I’m seeing The Last Saint – Beulah Koale’s in it, and I’m a Beulah Koale fan.
Koale plays Minka, son to a drug-dependent mother. At the end of his tether, he calls his absent father Joe for work-assistance-something. That call opens the door to Auckland’s criminal underworld, with all the violence, drugs and lurid lighting that entails.
With his sad, hesitant eyes and tense body language, Koale carries a battered dignity through the film, walls of integrity being eroded by an ugly, exploitative ecosystem. He’s a great moral centre, even as pain and injustice eat away at his soul. And while Koale shines playing the fundamentally decent young man in a fundamentally indecent world, he also opens a credible window to his soul’s corrosion. Minka mourns and rages in silence, and we can read that in the hardening of his gaze.
Koale’s just one part of The Last Saint, though, and while he sets a high bar for quality, the film never touches it, let alone clears it. That’s not to say it’s lacking in ambition: for his feature debut, Rene Naufahu tries to emulate the feel of a sprawling crime epic in Auckland’s small rooms and back-alleys, and there are times where he comes close to it. A claustrophobic meet-up with a family of Tongan addicts feels like a hallucinatory riff on Goodfellas-style environment-building; the film’s villain is an unhinged P kingpin named Pinball, the Mufasa of Auckland’s drug scene.
While Koale shines playing the fundamentally decent young man in a fundamentally indecent world, he also opens a credible window to his soul’s corrosion
Ambition on a shoestring explains why the film so often falls short technically, but it’s not really an excuse when those budget shortfalls so often take away from the experience. The Auckland underworld is lit in evocative blocks of colour, but the solid reds and greens make the grainy images so much more obvious; the day scenes, with their naturalistic lighting, don’t fare much better. The cinematography’s also rough as guts: the hand-held camera is unnecessarily jerky, dutch angles are inelegantly used for establishing shots, and Naufahu binges on focus pulls and other focus-based chicanery. While it’s absolutely an issue that independent filmmakers like Naufahu are often forced to compromise their film’s visual quality because of money issues, that doesn’t make the way the film looks any less distracting.
Lack of money doesn't really explain a poor script, either. The Last Saint sets out to explore the way we construct cultural identities through our families (blood or otherwise), and in the film’s defence, when it does this through the lens of a Polynesian experience, we’re given a fresh take on some tired insights. An ill-fated memorial to Joe's auntie scores best, navigating tricky issues of moral and cultural gatekeeping and how the former often comes at the expense of the latter, shutting people out of the family networks that could, should be their support. It’s almost dextrous – the only scene in the film that you could say that about.
Outside of that memorial, though, The Last Saint treats the exploration of constructed identities as a second thought. It’s underdeveloped subtext, subordinate to tired tropes, casual transphobia, narrative sexism, and moralising about drugs. That’s all but confirmed by the clumsy, coincidence-heavy third act. The film attempts to wrap up all its loose ends (including its treacly sub-Shopping romance) with a hysterical moral event horizon, and then resolves that with an unimpressive variation on Chekhov’ gun. It feels rushed and desperately in need of workshopping, and it’s the film ends so abruptly after it that it looms over the film like a cloud of gas.
It’s a rough position, to love an actor but not their film, to write about both without sounding like you’re making back-handed compliments. If I do sound like that, it’s only because Beulah Koale has the potential to be one of our greatest young actors. He shows that in The Last Saint, but the rest of the film is playing catch up.
Cover photo from Facebook.
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