Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds
Director: Ursula Grace Williams
Kiwi Ursula Grace Williams directs her first feature-length documentary exploring the life and times of national icon, Marlon Williams and his decision to record an entire album in te reo Maori.
The film sets off in the midst of Marlon’s career. Drawing on social media’s bountiful supply of concert footage and private moments, we are plunged into an exhaustive and exhausting blur of over a decade’s worth of relentless travel and performance. We watch as he is physically, emotionally and spiritually drained. London, Melbourne, LA, New York. Buses and planes. Bad food, too many cigarettes. We see he is literally wasting away, his always slender 1.9 metre frame becoming wraithlike.
Until he says, “Touring is really borrowing against the bank . . . There’s been times before I’ve gone on stage where I thought ‘I can’t talk. I’ve got literally nothing.’ Giving myself to the world has an expiry date.”
With this reckoning, he decides he needs to return to his roots, to Lyttleton, to his Maori heritage; and decides to make an album in Te Reo Maori. However, he is not fluent in the language, and having spent so much time away, has become far removed from the culture itself. There is so much to remember to re-learn and learn. Here, Ursula Grace Williams (no relation to Marlon) moves from archivist documentary to capturing Marlon’s reckoning with himself and what he has set out to do.
In stark contrast to the glitzy Troubador in LA and London’s Roundabout, and state-of-the-art recording studios – we find him in his childhood bedroom; cooking muttonbirds with his Mum; and opting to record in what’s little more than a cabin in the woods in Haast. And while he is always congenial, regardless of the circumstance, we can feel something is relaxing from within, something unwinding. His body less tense, his grin beaming pure joy. The spirit returns and the music flows.
Hard to imagine where Marlon Williams’ will take himself next. More music, more films – but I have the sense he’s unleashed something he wasn’t aware of and is dancing in a new light, learning new steps. We’ll have to wait and see where his feet take him.
Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, both the film and the album are out today. Go see and hear for yourself.
Veronica McLaughlin