Vermilion is the intimate story of Darcy (played by Jennifer Ward-Lealand), a composer and mother, and how she, with friends and family, tackles a summer of big changes and decisions. Made with investment from the New Zealand Film Commission, the majority female cast and 85% female production team make for a refreshingly progressive project that struggles under the weight of its ambition.
Having worked consistently on various shorts and larger projects, Vermilion is the first full-length feature from writer-director Dorthe Scheffmann. It’s an ambitious undertaking that seeks to combine multiple narrative threads into the somewhat restricted on-screen time-frame of an Auckland summer.
It’s difficult to talk about this movie without touching on the central plot point which (spoilers) is that Darcy will not be with us for too much longer. This is established very early and we all need to come to terms with it. It’s important to mention as it drives everything that subsequently happens; her daughters’ wedding, her best friends life changes, her swimming habits. Her pending mortality propels the lives around her, for better or worse.
Death and marriage, in particular, go hand in hand in Vermilion. There seems to be a very active sense of ‘passing the torch’ in these two things; one woman is passing and one is stepping into a new future, one life is ending but life will continue, etc. This is emphasised, it seems, with the daughter being a nurse. This allows her to hold multiple roles in the narrative and, most importantly, be there to simply continue when Darcy is gone. These are well-trodden ideas, but the passing of the torch is often seen through a male lens – Snr to Jnr, ‘man of the house now…’ – so it’s interesting to see further exploration with female protagonists.
Scheffmann makes some interesting directorial choices that set Vermilion apart, but not always in the most successful ways. It seemed, for example, that the movie was shot in 4:3 aspect ratio (think every TV you’ve ever seen in an inorganic collection). If so, it’s a choice I felt really worked for the material. It directs our focus to very specific points instead of allowing us to be distracted by things on the edge of frame, which works well with the intimate and interior nature of the movie. Additionally, it can be seen as just one of many frames in the movie – mortality, family, house, friends – and this is a choice that tells us that everything outside these frames is unimportant to us the viewer and, for the specific time-frame, the characters themselves.
However, some of the choices took me out of the movie as opposed to drawing me in. Specifically, a number of setups jarred – Darcy’s best friend coming into her bedroom in the middle of the night like an American teenager, Darcy walking in on her daughter and naked fiancé and thinking it appropriate to finish the conversation – and made me wonder if I was missing something. I’m sure we’re all happy for best friends to nip round unexpectedly, but less so when it’s the early hours of the morning and the reason seems to be that they had a good date. For a movie focussed on very true to life experiences (death, marriage, etc), it’s these little moments that undercut it the most.
Although there were directorial choices on Vermilion that I didn’t agree with, it’s impressive how successfully the movie plants itself in place and time without explicitly stating either. Sound queues like the drone of cicadas set scenes subtly, and the colours of a New Zealand summer pop from the screen with crisp blue skies and engulfing foliage of green. Credit to cinematographer Maria Ines Manchego for capturing something familiar for New Zealand audiences while keeping it enticing for the uninitiated.
Crucially, I struggled with Vermilion and the reason is mundane; I didn’t care about Darcy. Anyone dealing with loss and their pending mortality deserves our empathy, but the depths of that well can shift. It turns out I’m in shallower water when the focus is a successful middle-aged white woman living a wonderful life in an enormous Ponsonby villa. I realise that possibly points to a failing in me, but I wasn’t enticed to fix that crack by this movie. I should care about your characters but making that happen is largely the movies responsibility. I cared more about Kevin finding his parents in Home Alone, and he didn’t even have a tumour.
That said, Scheffmann has a specific demographic in mind for Vermilion and I don’t think I fit it – “why wouldn’t you make films for an incredibly buoyant economic group who are desperate for material about their lives?” (nzonscreen). It seems that Vermilion was made with an older female audience in mind. I think there are valid arguments to be made for films to have more of this focus, particularly in relation to offering older female actors more substantive roles. And, as mentioned, Vermilion has done brilliantly with its diversity in cast and production team.
Where I struggle, though, is whether we should be focusing on the very specific ‘affluent, middle-aged New Zealand white woman’ demographic that Vermilion is geared towards. I feel this particular group, along with any other incredibly buoyant economic group in New Zealand, should be focusing less on themselves and more on those without a swimming pool in their central Auckland homes. Sure, on-screen affirmation for these demographics must be great, but I’m not sure why anyone else should care? New Zealand is a diverse, multicultural society and affluent white people living in Ponsonby make up a very small part of that. What they want should not be of concern, least of all to themselves.
Ultimately, Vermilion is a film with a tight focus for a specific audience. That’s an ambitious position to take and, for me at least, it’s where things begin to fall over. The use of a diverse cast and crew is a reassuring sign of things to come in an industry struggling to retain relevance, but diversity in subject matter is required to truly see change.
Ryan Goodyear
November 2018