Based on the novel of the same name, Predicament is a coming-of-age story and a crime comedy. It's an account of the powerful and disturbing psychological fantasy world of adolescence within the familiar small-town setting of novelist Morrieson's writing.
Naïve teenager Cedric Williamson is involved with two older criminally inclined misfits in photographing and blackmailing amorous couples, and ends up an accomplice to murder. It is set in a 1930s Taranaki town similar to Morrieson's Hāwera.
But while Morrieson's first two novels were published in Australia, Predicament was rejected by Angus & Robertson. It went through numerous drafts, many abandoned, before (like Pallet on the Floor) being published posthumously by Dunmore Press of Palmerston North in 1975.[1]
The opening scene is of a hunched figure digging in the darkness, and demonstrates Simon Raby's superb cinematography; as does the next (daytime) shot of a high rickety wooden tower built by Cedric's mentally unbalanced father Martin. But when the characters start talking, what ought to be a darkly hilarious crime comedy dissolves into mush, according to reviewer David Larsen. The screenplay was written by the director Jason Stutter, who "chopped up and rearranged" Morrieson's dialogue.[2]
References
^"Ronald Hugh Morrieson" in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature p380 (1998, Oxford University Press, Auckland) ISBN0 19 5583485
^"The Predicament of dialogue" in The New Zealand Listener of 28 August 2010 p45
