MIFF NOTES: Mercenary (2016, Dir. Sacha Wolff)

It's telling that the lengthy conversation I had after seeing Mercenary wasn't rugby related. I was interested in how films get selected for prestigious film festivals and if selectors always screened films before programming them. It turns out they do.

I'm not sure what the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at Cannes was thinking when it programmed this lacklustre sports/culture/capitalism/coming-of-age fusion.

Despite a rock solid performance from lead Toki Pilioko (as Wallisian rugby recruit Soane), Sacha Wolff's film doesn't pull off any of its constituent parts particularly memorably. Its mediocre family drama gives enough of a dynamic to get buy-in on the narrative but not much more. The on-field action is pedestrian and given little focus. The romantic sub-plot is beautifully grounded but doesn't go deep enough to pull emotion. The "meatsacks making money" theme is probably the most involving, and certainly delivers the film's most intense moments, but even then the film's primary conflict (the ownership of Soane) is not well spelled out, which leaves much of the film's climax a little head-scratchy.

A lot of this muddiness appears to be tied up in the culture-gap aspects of the film, and this is certainly the film's primary interest. It's this aspect of Wolff's film that brings the real point of difference. A little more development here may have lifted Mercenary out of its overall non-descriptness.

★★☆

Trailer:

Mercenary screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.