Cousins: Three Maori women, living many lives, create a complex and compelling collage

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

A poetic drama about the lives of three Maori girls from the 1950s to the 1980s, Cousins is a heart-breaker, tempered with hope. 

Adapted from a 1993 novel by the now 83-year-old Maori writer Patricia Grace, the film interweaves different time periods, in dreamlike pattern, following the fates of Missy, Makareta and, especially Mata, the cousin who gets lost and is found again. 

Fresh from the orphanage young Mata gets to know her real family in Cousins

The film, which resonates with recent stories of abuse and deaths of kidnapped Indigenous children in North America, is distributed through Netflix in conjunction with Ava Duvernay’s company, Array Releasing.

In the present era, we first meet Mata (Tanea Heke), a barefoot, homeless woman in Wellington, where the lights and sounds of the city trigger her transition into subjective memories of dislocated childhood. The daughter of a died-young Maori mother and a British father who abandoned her, she returns in memory to her childhood as a student (played by Te Raukura Gray) in a school for orphaned children. 

The first of a series of family rescue attempts takes place when Mata is about eight, when she is re-discovered by her Aunt Gloria (Cian Elyse White) who arranges to bring her home to her Maori village for the holidays. There the young Mata meets her brash tom-boyish cousin, Missy (Keyahne Patrick Williams) who introduces her to the family, constantly reminding them to speak English so they child can understand them. 

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Mata, raised in school as a devoutly Christian child, is afraid of her Maori relatives who she believes “worship false gods and drink beer.” But she soon finds herself surrounded by curious and affectionate relatives, until she’s hauled back to the school for another term. 

An older cousin Makareta (Shannon Williams), a pretty girl known as “the spoiled one,” (who later becomes a lawyer), promises Mata, “We’re going to get you back.”

Co-directors Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith - who worked together on the 2017 anthology film, Waru, by eight Maori women directors - have adapted  the  narrative structure of Grace’s books to create a complex but follow-able collage, compressed into 93 minutes. 

The film is a combination of a casting and editing coup, featuring  actresses at three different points in their lives, childhood, young womanhood and late middle-age. This is more a question of the projection of personality than the details of hair and appearance, as the girls and women are typically shot in closeup, with rapt attention to the individual faces.

As the introverted Mata enters her late teens (played by Ana Scotney), she is returned to her white guardian, Mrs. Parkinson (Sylvia Rands) who exploits her as an unpaid servant. Eventually, the adult Maka gets a job in a hat factory, where other Maori women serve as her mentors in how to get by in the White persons’ world. She even has a short-lived marriage, and later, a period of happiness when she bonds with the boy child of a friend who she’s left to care for. 

Where the intervening years go before she ends up on the streets, we’re left to guess, until she is spotted one day on the street by her now terminally-ill cousin.

The rescuer is the former “chosen girl” Makareta, who years ago backed out of an arranged marriage designed to join family ancestral properties. Instead, her cousin, Missy, the one that keeps the family together, recognizes the importance of the marriage to her family’s future. She steps into her cousin’s place, marrying a stranger in what turns out to be a successful and happy relationship.

Stories following a group of girls through the decades are enduring (Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers). Cousins explores family and history through a specifically Maori perspective. That includes the importance of whakapapa (genealogy), extended family, ancestors and the traumatic removal of children from their families and homelands. 

The idea of family continuity and ownership of stories is embedded in the film, as Briar Grace-Smith, who co-directed, wrote and acts in the film is novelist Patricia Grace’s daughter-in-law.

Cousins. Directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith. Written by Briar Grace Smith. Starring, in ascending age, as Mareta (Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels, Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne and Briar Grace Smith), as Missy (Keyahne Patrick Williams, Hariata Moriarty and Rachel House) and as Mata (Te Raukura Grey, Ana Scotney, and Tanea Heke). Cousins is available on Netflix on July 22.