Punching above its weight in its story and acting
★★★★
IGraeme Tuckett
n the present day, teenager Jim is a promising boxer and a popular figure at the local high school. Jim’s new friend Whetu is maybe the only openly gay young man for miles around.
Whetu spends most of his time in a cabin in the dunes he has built for himself.
Jim’s dad, Stan – played by Tim Roth – walks a line between controlling his son in a way that might have worked a generation earlier and letting the young man chart his own course.
Stan’s ever-present bottle of whisky isn’t helping him forge any sort of adult relationship with Jim, or with the people of the town.
As the attraction between Jim and Whetu intensifies, Jim is torn between honouring his budding career as a boxer – with all the expectation that comes with it – or quitting the sport to pursue something a bit quieter and less overtly confrontational.
But with Stan in trouble with the local heavies, Jim’s path out of the ring might not be straightforward.
Writer-director Welby Ings has had Punch on his mind for more than a decade.
It’s always a sign of great writing, I think, that a film should be unique to the place it is set and yet feel universal.
The town in Punch is fictional, but it is also clearly an amalgam of a couple of settlements on the west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, in the hinterlands between the
Kawhia and Manukau harbours.
The iron sand dunes, the windswept beaches that Jim trains on and the insularity of the community are all specific and exact to the area.
But the paradox of writing that is so accurate to a location is that Punch could play on cinema screens anywhere in the world and the audience will understand this place and its rhythms perfectly.
And the reason, I guess, is that if you capture a place this well, it is a sign that the mahi and motivations of the people there have also been recognised, understood and deftly sketched in.
Punch comes alive in every glance, unspoken interaction, street and storefront. We believe in this place and these people and so the drama that unfolds between Jim, Whetu and Stan remains credible and engrossing. It might be Tim Roth’s name on the poster that sells the tickets and gets Punch some of the international exposure that is surely coming its way. And Roth is exceptional, in a way that reminded me a little of Peter Mullan’s work in Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe. But Roth is not the lead here – the work of Jordan Oosterhof and Conan Hayes as Jim and Whetu are the heart of Punch. The two young actors are well cast and a perfect fit for their roles.
The technical credits, especially Matt Henley’s (Coming Home In The Dark) cinematography and David Long’s soundtrack, are exceptional.
On a big screen, with a cinema sound system doing what it should,
Punch is a beautiful way to spend a few hours.
Punch is a tough, moving and confident piece of film-making. Get along and see it.
Punch is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.