“Johnny Is Nie Dood Nie”
As I noted a few weeks ago on
this blog, South African films seem rarely to earn back their budgets in
commercial theatrical releases (what happens when films reach their DVD release
is, as yet, unknown to me); connected to this is the observation that – here,
as in every other country – the box office returns for a film are hardly ever
correlated with the critical response to them by reviewers and other pundits.
Many South African critics have praised Johnny
Is Nie Dood Nie (“Johnny Isn’t Dead”), the debut feature film of director
Christiaan Olwagen, in the highest terms, yet its box office earnings are among
the lowest of any South African features this year. Rankings on Box Office Mojo
indicate that the only South African commercial release that made less money
was The Tribe (which I have not yet
seen), and that Johnny Is Nie Dood Nie
grossed a little less than half a million rand.
As told in its script, the
story of Johnny Is Nie Dood Nie is
more or less a synecdoche for the story of the Afrikaans youth of the late
1980s: those who were brought up in conventional middle-class Afrikaans
households and came of age during the most uncertain and unstable period of the
apartheid regime, as the National Party was writhing in its final death
agonies. Any reader can guess that the prevailing drive among these youths,
and, therefore, the characters in the film, was largely one of resistance to
the ruling party, its leader, State President PW Botha, its extreme political
conservatism, its war in Angola and Namibia, its totalitarian affinities, and
its infamously nationalistic and cruel policies of racial apartheid. The basis
for this resistance was the broader rebellion against the constricting,
socially and politically conservative Afrikaans society of the time. That this
rebellion only really took hold in the late 80s, while the youth of other
developed nations around the world had already brought about massive and
radical upheaval in their societies in the 60s, shows just how inhibiting and
controlling a regime the National Party’s was. My impression, both of the party
and many of its constituents, has long been that, throughout their history,
they pined for their European homelands that they had been forced to leave, and
worked their hardest to bring about an idealised replica of those homelands
here, at the bottom of Africa, complete with a strong and secure mother nation
(headed by the state, in conjunction with the dominant Dutch Reformed church)
resourced through exploitation of its colonies and their inhabitants (the South
African land and its indigenous peoples); the necessary difference in this case
was that the motherland and the colonies were in the same country, and had to
be separated by a strong force of permanent division in every regard imaginable
– spatial, economic, political, cultural, intellectual (through education),
even emotional and (to the best of the state’s ability) psychological. Against
this grisly backdrop, like the children of a domineering deacon-father, young
Afrikaners began turning the rumbling wheels of their defiance.
To see what other critics had to say about the film, click here.