Jackie van Beek and Madeline Sami have proved that it takes a couple of Kiwi filmmakers to not only break the beigeness of the standard rom-com but bring a refreshing authenticity and playfulness to the anti-rom-com genre while they're at it.
The pair star as Jen and Mel, two unlikely best friends united by a hearty cynicism about love and relationships, who run an unconventional business breaking up couples for cash. Feigning pregnancies, faking deaths, and impersonating cops and strippers are all part of their extensive repertoire. The Breaker Upperers sits somewhere between Broad City, Muriel's Wedding and Absolutely Fabulous with its ode to female friendship and unflinching, absurdist humour.
"I've had so many conversations with people about that dreadful feeling that you have when you realise that you have to break up with your partner but you just so desperately don't want to do it," said van Beek, talking about how the idea for the film first struck her. "I was thinking about how so many people would probably pay money not to go through that process... It's a sad thought, but a funny idea for a movie." She immediately called up the "funniest woman she knew at the time" to co-write it, five years later we have The Breaker Upperers, and the film seems to have landed at exactly the right time.
There's been a ravenous hunger for the distinctive taste of charming, quirky comedies from New Zealanders since Hunt For The Wilderpeople impressed everyone and earned Taika Waititi all kinds of attention. In the wake of the beginning of the toppling of Hollywood's sexist power structures, there's also a demand for more complex representations of women on and off screen. The Breaker Upperers serves all of the above and then some, wrapped up in the funniest film title going to boot.
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Comparison's to Waititi's work isn't a total reach, and not only because he's on board the project as an executive producer. As someone Sami and van Beek have worked with for years, they had their old mate in mind as one of the only directors who might have been able to achieve what they were going for. It was only with the deadline for the film closing in and with Waititi held up shooting Thor: Ragnarok, that the pair decided to make the leap to co-direct the feature together.
"The Breaker Upperers sits somewhere between Broad City, Muriel's Wedding and Absolutely Fabulous with its ode to female friendship and unflinching, absurdist humour."
"Because New Zealand is so small and we've all worked together so much, I'm actually very happy to be compared to our very talented friends," said van Beek. Sami agreed, offering up that they should probably just change their names to Bret and Jemaine.
They pitched the film to the New Zealand Film Commission with What We Do In The Shadows as their model — the 2014 vampire mockumentary was co-written, directed by and starring Waititi and Jemaine Clement (who makes a brief cameo in The Breaker Upperers) which also starred Sami in an "insignificant part" and van Beek in a "less insignificant part" (it was also just recently picked up for a reboot for US television).
"If the male Jackie and Mads can do it," they thought, they might as well "give this a go". With Sami and van Beek behind the wheel, it's evident that their shared humour and authenticity is able to flow through the film. "We both love romantic comedies but we both shared a similar feeling toward them in that they always end very conventionally, and we really wanted to, in our small way, have the message that it doesn't have to be perfect to be a happy ending," said Sami.
"It doesn't have to be a heterosexual marriage in a church," added van Beek. "There's such a bigger world out there and it's great that that's being explored a bit more creatively by people and it's certainly making its way into the mainstream."
Among a stellar amount of appearances from the cream of New Zealand's comedy crop, Australia's own Celia Pacquola makes her first feature film appearance as the distraught Anna, whose recurring presence holds a mirror up to the suffering Jen and Mel are causing. "It was at a really busy time for me but it was written, directed by and starring two really funny women — of course I want to do that, it's everything I stand for," Pacquola told The Music.
She may have spent most of the shoot wailing into the camera and standing in corners maintaining a constant stream of tears, but it paid off in a character that deftly straddles sympathy and ridiculousness. However, Pacquola claims that the most real thing about this movie is the relationship she witnessed between van Beek and Sami as they continually changed hats on set: "Their friendship is so natural together, I bought it."
While the film revels in its place as an escapist, feel-good romp — its effortlessly, intersectional injection of casting and storylines is actually somewhat revolutionary in the world of conventional films that so often get stuck in certain (straight, white) demographics. From the unabashed bisexuality of one the lead characters, to the multicultural melting pot of Auckland depicted, the film embraces characterisation without reducing anyone to a tokenistic cameo.
"We were conscious of the fact that heartbreak is universal and we wanted to represent a spectrum of people that are going through this and who our characters would come across," said Sami. "It was intentional to present the world as we see it, which is everyone living harmoniously and unharmoniously together..."
When the film premiered at SXSW in March, the hype train surrounding it soon took off, and among the fanfare and the comparisons to their Kiwi contemporaries, van Beek noted that it definitely felt like they were "being interviewed as female filmmakers," and that actually wasn't all bad. "There's always that trepidation with women and comedy which I don't understand at all... The funniest people I grew up with were women," added Sami. "You still get asked that question occasionally: 'Are women funny?'"
"Certainly I haven't been asked that question in the past twelve months, I don't think you're allowed to ask that question anymore with the current political climate," said van Beek.
"It's nice not being asked those ridiculous rudimentary questions, but I enjoy being in focus as women. I think it's important for women to embrace the spotlight and talk about making films as women... It will be nice when it's just so normalised that we're not interviewed as female filmmakers and we're just interviewed as filmmakers, but we're not there yet."
All in all, the pair are pretty impressed to see so many people buying into their silliness, and while they claim they didn't aim to "dig too deep", they have certainly struck the feels. To risk stating the implied, The Breaker Upperers eschews a neatly wrapped storyline to celebrate the idea of being happy outside of a conventional romantic relationship (without denying the audience a spirited dance off in the end). While they will both laughingly admit to being married with kids (van Beek to comedian Jesse Griffin and Sami to singer-songwriter Phillipa Margaret Brown, better known as Ladyhawke) this idea was important to both of them.
"We want people to walk out of that cinema whoever they are — male, female, straight, queer — and walk out feeling like it's all cool," added van Beek.
Sami mentioned she's had a lot of feedback on Twitter about her character's queerness: "Someone said to me it's like the queerest film that's not a queer film that they've seen in a long time. Which I feel really proud of, because that's life, gay people are all around us."
"We had a very strong idea when we started making this film that we wanted people who might not have their shit together to watch our film to feel that's okay," said Sami.
From insights into the complexities of modern relationships and dating, to the daggiest coke snorting scene you've ever seen on film, The Breaker Upperers is everything you did and didn't know you wanted from a movie.
The Breaker Upperers is on general release from 26 Jul. The creatives behind the film will be on a national Q&A tour from 16 Jul, full details can be found at thebreakerupperers.com.
