“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

Can You Ever Forgive Me? played in South African theatres in February and March, living on the little attention it had garnered from its three Oscar nominations (Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay). The second movie by American director Marielle Heller (her first was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, starring Kristen Wiig), it’s adapted from the confessional memoir of the same name by the author Lee Israel. In the late 80s, after writing a number of notable magazine profiles and celebrity biographies, Israel’s career fell into decline, aggravated by alcoholism and her particularly prickly personality. (A typical quote of Israel: “Macmillan wanted an unauthorized biography [of Estée Lauder] — warts and all. I accepted the offer though I didn't give a shit about her warts.”) In the movie, Lee (played by Melissa McCarthy) is told that she conceals herself so well behind her famous subjects that no one knows her well enough to pay her for her writing. She finds a surprising advantage in that, as she stumbles into the world of collectible literary memorabilia — where she successfully sells off her craftily composed forgeries of famous authors’ personal letters. She enlists the help of an ebulliently shady character, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), who thaws her polar temperament a little, but is still slammed out by her impenetrable barriers to personal connection.

The specific thematic insights packed by Heller’s movie are not particularly original nor profound, but they ring persuasively and with authenticity: to connect with others, you must expose yourself; to encapsulate the kinds of personas embodied by famous modern authors is itself a form of imaginative art. Lee is somewhat justified to want credit for her compelling forgeries, and Israel received it in oblique ways in real life; her memoirs were received well by critics and the public alike, and her forgeries (most notably those of Noël Coward) were still taken as the real thing long after she’d been exposed. It’s still a remarkable thing to see a movie so frank about so many characters’ homosexuality, and Heller touchingly shows the need for intimacy and acceptance that is masked by flamboyant and impervious personas. In fact, Heller’s entire movie is sensitively wrought and finely grained, with surprisingly tender moments and an overflow of lively, fascinating personality. McCarthy’s performance is especially focused and dynamic, even if the character wishes to avoid those qualities at nearly any cost. Richard E. Grant is terrific fun, and brings an endearing dignity to even the most sordid aspects of Jack. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not itself a great movie, but it features the kind of careful attention, clear-sighted observation, and tenderness — call it love — that makes an artful storytelling not only worthwhile, but a great pleasure.

What to See This Holiday: Three Netflix Picks

Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman)

Available on Netflix.

Lazing on Brooklyn’s beaches, trawling the borough for weed, snagging clandestine hook-ups, the protagonist of Eliza Hittman’s movie Beach Rats, Frankie (Harris Dickson), is an exemplary shirker. Beach Rats is a stunning work of aimlessness and languor; the heat of the summer sun, and the vape and marijuana smoke add a haze to Hittman’s already indolent and largely wordless images. Normally I’m annoyed by or resistant to art-house films in which characters offer many meaningful looks but share few of their feelings, ideas, queries, and concerns; it often seems evasive, disdainful, or unimaginative on the part of the filmmakers. But the lack of talk between Hittman’s characters is a striking artistic depiction of the state of their intellectual and emotional lives: they have no expressive outlets, no communicative means at all of expression; they suppress true emotions and any hint of vulnerability; they don’t indulge aspirations or plans for the future, reflect, dream, visualise, contemplate; the silencing of their inner lives is a deliberately enacted by them, and is memorably evoked by Hittman.

And Frankie encounters distinct difficulties from this silencing. Whatever troubles of identity the other guys are evading, Frankie faces the added dimension of sexual orientation and identity: He chats with men via sex webcam sites and starts to meet up with them to have sex with them, but, as he informs one of his prospective hook-ups, he doesn’t really think of himself as gay. He also unenthusiastically starts up a romantic relationship with a girl named Simone (Madeline Weinstein). He avoids the thought of anything gay altogether, just as he avoids thinking of himself at all, and avoids talking about anything substantial with his family or his smoking companions (he asserts more than once that they’re not his friends). Hittman deftly suggests Frankie’s sensitivity and empathy, as he apologises to Simone after insulting her, and tries to hide emotional pain when considering his family’s suffering (his father is very sick with cancer). But, when given any opportunity arises to deal with his problems, such as when his mother approaches him, Frankie hardens his heart and erects an impenetrable wall of invulnerability. Hittman’s images inhere intimacy, energy, and density where her characters elude these qualities; the tension tightens and relaxes with the unease of youthful anxieties, and she suggests some of the disastrous consequences that such unease may lead to.

What to See This Holiday: “I Am Not a Witch”

I Am Not a Witch is the debut feature film of the filmmaker Rungano Nyoni. Nyoni was born in Zambia and moved to the UK with her family when she was nine years old. Her short films made after she graduated from the University of London earned her a formidable reputation, and this new feature has launched a promising international career in feature filmmaking, having played at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival (in the Directors’ Fortnight), winning Nyoni a BAFTA, and garnering a number of prizes at the British Independent Film Awards. I give this background merely because I’m so pleased to report the successes of an African emigrant in the art-house filmmaking world, and because I derive great pleasure from anticipating the work to come from young artists whose early works are already so strong.

I Am Not a Witch, which is mostly in Nyanja, with English subtitles, follows an eight-year-old girl (Maggie Mulubwa) who first goes without a name and is later named Shula (“uprooted” in Nyanja), and who is accused by some of the angry villagers around her of witchcraft. Shula is totally alone, afraid, and wholly uncertain of herself, and does not deny the villagers’ accusations, opening her to exploitation by local leaders who claim to protect witches. Shula is taken by the government official Mr Banda (Henry Phiri) to a camp for witches, where other accused women are kept practically as slave labourers and tourist attractions. A witch-doctor judges whether or not they really are witches (note that when a man can show capabilities of witchcraft, he enjoys a position of power) and, if they are, they’re fitted with harnesses to which ribbons are tied, keeping them within a tight radius around the camp’s truck that transports them from their beds to wherever the government requires them to be. Shula is singled out for witch-related work by the government: She divines guilty culprits from a line-up of criminal suspects and brings rain to the fields of farmers who pay her handlers, and is rewarded with favours such as biscuits and gin. With the help of Mr Banda’s wife, she grows in self-assurance, but also gains awareness of the grim situation she’s in and the abusive systems of power that brought her there.

What to See This Holiday: “Paris is Burning”

Available on Netflix and on DVD.

Fans of the reality competition series RuPaul’s Drag Race would do well to learn about the roots of the drag culture represented by the series, and perhaps the preeminent audiovisual guide to that culture’s development is the documentary Paris is Burning, by Jennie Livingstone. In fact, it comes not from the roots of the culture, but was filmed and released at what many saw as the end of the Golden Age of New York City drag balls, in the late 1980s. Livingstone films some of these drag balls, and interviews members of the black, Latino, gay, and transgender communities of New York City who participate in them.

Livingstone met a group of young gay men in Manhattan while she was a film student at New York University, who introduced her to the drag ball culture. She met the dancer Willi Ninja, who gave her an education in drag competitions and the peculiar phenomenon of “voguing,” of which he offers an extended explanation onscreen in Paris is Burning. Ninja subsequently became an important figure in popular music and dance, and was crucial to introducing voguing to the mainstream culture.

Livingstone also interviews a number of prominent drag queens onscreen, who explain various aspects of drag culture, as well as a few young gay and transgender people, who relay their experiences as queer and vulnerable people in a tough, brutal city. Of particular interest to Livingstone is the young trans woman Venus Xtravaganza, who was a teenager when she was first interviewed by Livingstone.

Opening Up in “Let the Sunshine In”

The 2018 European Film Festival at Cinema Nouveau is about to end, but those who can run may still catch the last screening of one of the great pleasures on offer, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In, from France, which is showing tonight at 20:00 at Rosebank Nouveau. It stars Juliette Binoche as a bourgeois painter in Paris named Isabelle, a moderately successful artist who has entered and now traverses along the French modern art scene, but seems to exist outside of its cliques, ideologies, and prejudices, and perhaps not entirely by choice. The story moves along the plane of her romantic life, and intersections with her personal and professional lives (though it would seem that, in Paris, very little effort is made by artists to ever separate them). The movie opens with Isabelle naked in bed while her married lover, a banker named Vincent (Xavier Beauvois), pneumatically heaves on top of her. The scene’s severe physicality is both heightened and punctured by the short snaps of dialogue: “Not cumming?” “You finish, I feel good.” (I quote subtitles from memory.)

And so it is with the rest of the movie. As Isabelle shifts from one lover to another, as her emotional state improves and declines, the talk throughout the movie seems to both expand and undercut the developing moods and emotions. It doesn’t bounce between melodrama and comedy, but ascends to a plane that covers both, that allows for the depiction of a life streaked with tears as well as bouncing on laughter. Isabelle herself wobbles between anguish, tenderness, doubtfulness, apprehension, and a warm glow of bliss (one that’s depicted quite literally in the final scene and especially the final shot, and that points back to the movie’s title). And she varies just as much with one lover as between any two or more of them. Following her abrupt break-up with the disdainful Vincent, she hooks up with an actor in emotional and professional turmoil (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a man of the working class, whose profession is not revealed, but with whom she undergoes acute social tension (Paul Blain), an artistic associate who is reluctant to start up an affair (Alex Descas), and with her ex-husband and the father of her ten-year-old daughter, whom she keeps inviting back into her bed (Laurent Grévill).

“Jeanne Dielman” and Why We Need More Women Filmmakers

Available for free on MUBI (until 14 June 2018).

Over the weekend, I posted about the MUBI Film Schools Program, which allows any user in South Africa to stream selected films for free, and to which any South African can sign up for free. My first experience of it was, as I wrote, a major event; the second, which this post is about, was a great wonder. Its full title is Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; it was written and directed by the queer Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and released in 1975; and it’s rightly heralded as a revelatory breakthrough of feminism in cinema, in that not only is it a great and momentous film made by a woman, but it takes a woman’s view of a woman — of women and the lives of women — as its subject, and puts forward vast and pointed ideas about that woman, about that woman’s view, about those women’s lives, and about the political circumstances and imperatives of those lives that could not have been done so strongly and so exquisitely not only by any man, but by any other filmmaker in history. Akerman — who tragically committed suicide in 2015, at the age of 65 — shot the film with an entirely female crew, which would have worked out alright, except that she didn’t get to choose any of them. Working off a government grant (of about US$120,000), she was assigned a crew, and, though she didn’t appreciate the directive, she managed to deliver one of the crucial works of movie history at the age of twenty-four years.

Jeanne Dielman follows its petite bourgeois title character through three days of her life, as she performs her routine domestic tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and tidying up. (The rest of the title is the address of her Brussels apartment, where she lives with her son.) It also depicts her work that she takes on to support herself and her son, namely prostitution. While he’s away at school, she discreetly accepts gentleman callers who arrive soon after she’s placed her food on the stove and leave a little while later, as she prepares to set out dinner. Her daily activities (excluding her sex with callers, but including a nude shot of her cleaning herself in the bath) are shown in real time and very long takes, all in pretty much the same framing, with the camera entirely stationary throughout each scene and at table-top height, at an equal distance from the subject at all times (and the subject is just about always Jeanne Dielman). An interruption to her routine is introduced on the second day, and the startlingly spiralling and abstracted psychological after-effects of it throw that very routine and its vast web of implications into harrowing relief.

Greta Gerwig’s Beautiful “Lady Bird”

Simply put, Greta Gerwig’s second feature as a director (and her first as sole director), as well as the sixth feature she’s written, Lady Bird, displays a sharp perception and emanates a warm tenderness to an uncommon degree in contemporary movies. This may not be surprising, and yet is something remarkable, because Gerwig has conceived of and executed a story rooted in her own experiences and linked to her own biography. Filmmakers often find new sides to their artistry when filming something from their own experiences, but many of them — perhaps to protect the parts of themselves they see as most vulnerable — end up coating their vision in hazy nostalgia, easy and stereotypical preconceptions, or rigid and unyielding methods of representation. Gerwig avoids these pitfalls, and arrives at a work of authentic and probing thought as well as exquisite emotional insight. If we’re to count it as a directorial début, it’s certainly one of the great ones of recent years, along with Jordan Peele’s in Get Out, and Yance Ford’s in Strong Island. Her work is more than remarkable: it’s beautiful, and accomplished with the whimsical charm and presence, and practically Mozartian grace that we have come to expect from her as an artist.

Lady Bird follows a student named Christine (Saoirse Ronan) — who has given herself the nickname “Lady Bird” — through her final year of high school at a Catholic girls school in Sacramento, California, from the start of her senior year in the autumn of 2002 through to the start of the next year when she arrives at college in the autumn of 2003. It’s not strictly or literally autobiographical, according to Gerwig — none of the events in the film are taken directly from her life — but the connection to actual experiences is both conspicuous and touching. Like Lady Bird, Gerwig grew up in Sacramento, went to a Catholic girls school, exhibited “a performative streak” as she grew up, and went to college in New York City. (Christine is also Gerwig’s mother’s name.) What’s touching is the deep personal care with which she has crafted each of her characters as well as the atmosphere surrounding them and the events they go through. Lady Bird’s relationship and interactions with her mother (Laurie Metcalf) — a nurse, as Gerwig’s mother was — are central to the plot, though scenes with her classmates, her friends, her romantic interests, her father, her brother, and her teachers are not merely subplots, but integral to the main thrust of the story.

What to See This Weekend: Mind Games

“Masterminds” (Jared Hess, 2016)

Showing on DStv M-Net Movies Premiere (Channel 104) on Monday, 9 October, at 16:55; Saturday, 14 October, at 13:00; available on Microsoft; on Amazon; on Vudu; on DVD.

Though Jared Hess’s frenzied new comedy is far more conventional in flavour than the earlier two that I’ve seen — Napoleon Dynamite, from 2004, and Nacho Libre, from 2006 — it’s just as much a delightful and distinctive treat. It’s based on the real-life Loomis Fargo robbery in North Carolina that took place in October 1997, in which David Ghantt, a supervisor for the cash handling company Loomis Fargo, stole over $17 million in cash from the regional vault in Charlotte, North Carolina where he worked, collaborating with an ex-employee, Kelly Campbell, her associate, Steve Chambers, and a number of co-conspirators. I don’t know the precise degree to which the film has stuck to fact — from what I can see on the Wikipedia entry on the robbery, the main points of the story were all kep intact for the film, but a high level of invention and imagination is displayed openly by Hess in his telling.

Zach Galifianakis plays David, a decent and naïve security employee, who falls for Kelly (Kristen Wiig) when she starts working as his partner, even though he’s already engaged, to a rancorous store clerk named Jandice (Kate McKinnon). When Kelly leaves the job and moves in with her childhood friend Steve (Owen Wilson), who is now a professional thief and scammer, she keeps contact with earnest and infatuated David, who, through his indulgent affection and eagerness to win Kelly over, is persuaded by Steve to help them rob the cash vault one weekend. They then get David out of the country while keeping the cash to themselves, while Kelly’s continuing contact with David introduces unforeseen complications to their plans. Jason Sudeikis plays an unnervingly avid (and zanily funny) hitman who is roped in as part of Steve’s attempts to simplify matters, and Leslie Jones plays an FBI special agent assigned to the case of the heist, whose hilarious efforts to secure a confession from her suspects reminded me of the task of a director who seeks to extract a meaningful performance from his actors — both have to modify their methods from one individual to the next, the moment they’re looking for may not arrive when and where they had expected or planned it, and both have to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and to capture moments as they arise.

“Krotoa”’s Middling Middle Ground

Having finally seen Roberta Durrant’s hyped biopic Krotoa, about the Khoi woman who lived among the Dutch settlers of Jan Van Riebeeck’s Cape Colony as a mediator and translator, it’s difficult for me to believe that the film was made by a morally and artistically serious person — even less so by a woman who purports to be serious about discussing the historical treatment of women. It’d be boorish for me to use such words as “atrocious” or “abominable,” the staples for describing films one finds particularly distasteful, in the face of a story of actual historical atrocities and moral abominations, but I find that Durrant may well care less than I do about treating the subject with respect and good sense. The failures of her film are manifold, and arise from critical malfunctions on a range of levels of the film’s development.

(To read what other critics had to say about the film, click here.)

Most immediately apparent are the many failures of execution: Durrant and her director of photography, Greg Heimann, insist on eliminating any sense of personal or critical perspective on the shots they film, offering the blandest, most clichéd establishing shots of a beach, a fort, and the waves breaking on the west coast, and focusing squarely on actors’ faces during conversation, to the exclusion of all setting, context, and visual nuance, and with no consideration for meaningful framing, compositions, lighting, movement, or depth (except, perhaps, in what Durrant must consider the evocation of a painting, in the vulgar love scene between Krotoa and the Danish doctor Pieter Van Meerhof, and in the stunningly indelicate allusion to the famous painting of Van Riebeeck’s arrival in the Cape); Durrant and her cast refuse to step out of the woefully constrained soap-opera style of acting they learned on South African television and from pedestrian South African film productions, emphasising their exasperatingly simplistic emotions with a dependence on hackneyed expressions, and suffocating any hope for spontaneity and freedom in their performances; Durrant urges her composer, Murray Anderson, to churn the most prosaic emotional reactions with a vapid and overbearing score that treads all the wrong steps at all the wrong moments; Durrant and her costumers and makeup artists devise to present all the actors as awkwardly and obviously out of place as possible in what were probably the thoroughly-researched but ill-refashioned looks of the day.

Critic’s-Eye View: “Krotoa”

The new biopic on the Khoi historical figure Krotoa opened last week. Roberta Durrant’s film brought in mixed reviews, which is probably to be expected for any film dealing with a biter topic in South Africa’s colonial history. Before being released theatrically, it was shown at a number of international film festivals. It won Best Film at the Harlem International Film Festival in New York, and was in the official selection for the Artemis Women in Action Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, the International Film Festival for Environment, Health and Culture, and the World Film Awards. I’ve compiled here a number of reviews of the film for readers to get a good idea of the range of reactions to Durrant’s biopic — let me know of any that I’ve missed.

To read this blog’s review of Krotoa, click here.

Writing for Channel24, Leandra Englebrecht, who awarded the film four stars out of five, declares it “deserving of all its awards”:

“Krotoa is not an easy watch but it is a necessary watch — it explores colonialism, race, sexual violence, and identity. … The strength of this film is largely due to the brilliant Crystal-Donna Roberts as Krotoa. She gives a nuanced performance of a woman who is caught between two cultures and her own ambitions. Great care went into the Khoi representation; the cast who played the roles learned the Khoi language for authenticity. … 

Krotoa is a thought-provoking film that will stay with you long after the credits roll. This film is a must-see for all South Africans.”

Critic’s-Eye View: “Keeping Up With the Kandasamys”

Once again, I find that I am the only blogger who has posted an external review on the IMDb page of a South African film (click here to read it). For those who’d like to hear what others have to say about Keeping Up With the Kandasamys, Jayan Moodley’s 2017 Chatsworth comedic version of Romeo and Juliet, I’ve extracted excerpts from reviews posted by other South African moviegoers and compiled them here, for your perusal.

In a review posted on the Channel24 website last Friday, Gabi Zietsman states:

“Keeping Up with the Kandasamys is a lovely stroll through Durban’s famous Indian suburb Chatsworth and the lives of those who live there, even if it might be exaggerated. The two leading ladies, Jailoshini Naidoo and Maeshni Naicker are a dynamite duo and you can’t help but wonder why we haven’t seen them in more movies. …

The disses and clapbacks are pure gold, and these veteran actresses’ comedic timing can make Trevor Noah take notes. Director Jayan Moodley and writer Rory Booth work great as a team and produced an entertaining comedy that will make you scream with laughter. …

Even though the film celebrates Indian culture and identity, the characters remain relatable across all racial and cultural lines, connecting with the audience’s own familial experiences. …

The one thing that failed the movie was the dramatic scenes. When it finally comes out why the two women have been at each other’s throats all these years, the film takes a sudden sombre turn that doesn’t really fit with the first part of the film. The emotions and tears felt like they were being forced through a meat grinder, but luckily it managed to find its way back to the humour for the end, complete with a Bollywood dance number.”

Two Households in Fair Chatsworth

“Keeping Up With the Kandasamys”

Read what other critics have to say about the film here.

Jayan Moodley sets her film Keeping Up With the Kandasamys, which she directed and co-wrote with Rory Booth, squarely in the area of Chatsworth. And, apart from a few brief minutes in the gardens of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, she never leaves Chatsworth, illustrating the self-contained society of the area and the unique cultural compounds that make up life in it.

It’s obvious that Moodley possesses great affection for and knowledge of Chatsworth, and the plot she’s constructed works to give her views of life there along various social, cultural, and economic vectors. It involves two neighbouring families – the Kandasamys and the Naidoos – and the overblown, nearly lifelong feud between the two wives, Jennifer Kandasamy (Jailoshini Naidoo) and Shanti Naidoo (Maeshni Naicker), which is brought to a clash when they discover the burgeoning love affair between their children, Shanti’s son Prinesh (Madhushan Sing) and Jennifer’s daughter Jodi (Mishqah Parthiepal).

Critic’s-Eye View: “Tess”

When I posted my review of Meg Rickards’s new film Tess, I noticed that mine is the only external review to which a link is provided on the film’s IMDb page. For those who’ve stumbled onto this page from there looking for a range of views on the film, I include here a few notes from other reviews published by South African moviegoers, with links where possible.

Writing for the City Press last June, when Tess was playing at the Durban International Film Festival, Charl Blignaut notes that the “young actress Christia Visser gives one of the bravest, most potent and internalised performances of any of the films at the Durban International Film Festival this year.” Further describing the aesthetic value of the film, he writes:

“Director Meg Rickards has moved from documentary features to narrative ones and brings that journalistic gaze along. Her opening sequence – shot by a drone racing across the ocean until it crashes into Tess’s balcony window – is majestic and her performance direction solid. Almost too solid in that this is a conventional and realistic film with little experimentation. Where it takes risks, though, is in its content.

For once the sex worker is a white woman and it is black women who come to her aid, neatly flipping the script. The violent male gangster is also countered by a kind and confused husband. And, gratefully, Rickards has shot in luminous light colours and delicious blues, contesting her dark story.

Harrowing and important, the film is in competition in Durban and has one last screening tonight. Take your man friends and go and see it. You’ll need a drink afterwards.”

The Numbed Pains and Furies of “Tess”

“Tess”

That sexual and domestic violence are severe problems in all pockets of South African society should not come as a shock to any moviegoer walking into Meg Rickards’s new feature film, Tess. Rickards doesn’t aim only to inform us of this fact, but to evoke in us the rage and the pain that attend the victims of these acts of violence, and she hopes that that common sympathy in audiences can help turn the tide in our country and change what we now commonly know as a rape culture. Her film is adapted from the novel Whiplash by Tracey Farren (first published in 2008), about the doleful sex worker Tess who, in the course of a career on the beach front of Muizenberg, unexpectedly falls pregnant. Tess (played by Christia Visser) has been masking her own deep psychological pain with a stone-cold face of impenetrable flint, and numbing it with an increasingly dangerous codeine addiction.

Rickards shows us, as if forcing both herself and the audience to watch without flinching, the wearying sexual encounters Tess undergoes daily, her stressful living circumstances with a neighbour whose boyfriend flies into sudden and murderous rages, the physical toll taken by a drug addiction, and the crushing spectacle of an abortion. There’s no aspect of a sex worker’s life that she finds too unseemly to put up on the screen for an audience to endure; in fact, she films these scenes and scenarios precisely because she wants her audience to know those grimy specifics – one scene of terrible physical and sexual violence even depicts Tess’s brutal rape by an unrelenting john. There’s brief nudity later on as well, to highlight the degradation in Tess’s work; Rickards intelligently offers sensationalism without arousal.

Opening the Box

“Dis Ek, Anna”

Izel Bezuidenhout (as Anna), Nicola Hanekom, and Morne Visser in Sara Blecher's "Dis Ek, Anna"

Dis Ek, Anna opened throughout South Africa on Friday 23 October 2015, with one of the most anticipated releases ever for a South African film, mostly due to the popularity of the two books from which it’s adapted – Anchien Troskie’s Dis Ek, Anna (“It’s Me, Anna”) and Die Staat Teen Anna Bruwer (“The State vs Anna Bruwer”). The essential subject of the film is known to most people, whether or not they’ve read the book: Anna, as a 12-year-old girl, is repeatedly raped by her paedophile stepfather. The event that triggers the telling of her story is nearly as well known: Anna, as a 30-year-old woman, arrives at her stepfather’s house one evening, and when he answers the door she shoots and kills him. These are the two crucial facts of the film. Based on the anticipation among South African audiences for its release, stoked by the film’s screenings at the Durban International Film Festival in July and the Silwerskermfees in August (where it won Best Feature Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for Morné Visser) and the film’s overwhelmingly positive receptions there, most people have decided that it’s precisely what they’d like to go see.

Dis Ek, Anna is directed by Sara Blecher, who also directed Ayanda, which opened three weeks ago, and Otelo Burning, released in 2011. With Dis Ek, Anna she takes a clear stance of condemning child rape, but shows no perspective or even interest in the characters of her story. In any of the scenes where the stepfather, Danie (played by Morné Visser), molests or rapes Anna (Izel Bezuidenhout), Blecher’s camera tactfully moves into a position where nothing distasteful is shown, while still efficiently conveying all the necessary information. An obvious reason for this is that it would be illegal to show much more of Bezuidenhout – who is still a child – but Blecher has personal reasons as well. We can’t stand to see an adult man raping a young girl, and Blecher can hardly stomach the thought. She leads up to each instance of molestation bearing the notion that if we actually saw it, we would be repulsed, and probably even psychologically damaged in some way. Her images successfully convey, mostly pre-emptively, the horror she feels when she contemplates Danie’s actions. The outcry that broke out when Dis Ek, Anna was given the age restriction of 18 (SVLN) by the Film and Publication Board – for apparently containing images that may be considered pornographic – was just; there is no visible nudity in the film, and nothing in here is erotic or rousing. It’s the furthest from pornography any sex could be.

Out In Africa

“While You Weren’t Looking”

This article originally appeared in Perdeby, and is reprinted here with the editor’s permission.

Petronella Tshuma and Thishiwe Ziqubu as lovers from the opposite sides of the tracks in Catherine Stewart's "While You Weren't Looking"

The thesis of Catherine Stewart’s new film While You Weren’t Looking, which opened on 2 October, is made explicit by the lovelorn gay lecturer Mack (Lionel Newton), who tells his students, “If you can ‘queer’ gender, you can ‘queer’ anything.” He means that the broad-mindedness of the openly homosexual, bisexual, and sexually explorative characters in the film – as well as those who approvingly accept them – is precisely what is required for South African society to move into the non-racial, non-sexist, progressive state to which it aspires.

Noble though the film’s position be, it fails to match this vision with artistry. With its clumsy dialogue and artificial performances, the film doesn’t take a sympathetic look at the lives of queer South Africans as much as it retreads jaded stereotypes – the gay art lovers, the gaudy feather boas – and tries (and fails) to kindle discussion on the problems they face. We have a gorgeously inclusive Constitution, as the characters assert, but in spite of this – or, perhaps, because of it – problems still arise.

Lucy in the Mire, But Still With Diamonds

DVD Notes: “Across the Universe”

Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood indulge in an entirely sober make-out session

Along with the wave of new musical films that arrived with the new millennium after the genre had lain dormant for over a decade – Dancer in the Dark, Chicago, Dreamgirls, etc. – came the prominence of a subgenre, perhaps a companion to the new trends in pastiche and irony (of which Pulp Fiction was of course the greatest proponent): the jukebox musical. The jukebox musical is a musical which uses popular songs as its musical score, often with something in common, such as the original performing artist or recent billboard performance. The songs are strung together in a contrived context. Think Mamma Mia! and Moulin Rouge: shameless romance, character ludicrously breaking into song at the most awkward moments, a preposterous plot, often incoherent and wildly inconsistent in tone – and we can never get enough of it.

Musical Inclinations

DVD Notes: “August Rush”

Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Freddie Highmore jam in Washington Square

In his review of Whiplash, Richard Brody writes, “Movies about musicians offer musical approximations that usually satisfy in inverse proportion to a viewer’s devotion to the actual music behind the story.” One might make the same comment just as aptly when discussing August Rush, except, while Whiplash was clearly about jazz musicians, it’s difficult to know what musical tradition August Rush has taken as its subject. We’re treated with the rarefied musings of the eponymous 11-year-old musical prodigy (Freddie Highmore) and his mentor, “Wizard” (Robin Williams), about how music is what surrounds us all – in the air, on the wind, in all living forms – and what connects everything, including all of us to everything else, even the stars and galaxies. One has only to “follow the music” – forgive me, “The Music” – to reach one’s fulfilment, the movie posits.

The New Yorker recently published a humourous article in which Ayn Rand (a fictional persona of the novelist) reviewed children’s movies. “An industrious woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté,” she writes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. “She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathise with the main character.” She gave it Zero Stars. Sadly, Ms Rand was not around to provide her very straightforward acuity and pointed views on August Rush, but I think it would’ve been just the thing to cut through the drivel offered here.

Ode on Romance and the Romantic

DVD Notes: "Bright Star"

Abbie Cornish reads a poem from her beloved in "Bright Star"

The Romantic poets emphasised instinct and intuition over reason and rationale, and cultivated an interest in mysticism and the supernatural, parallel, and often connected, to a reverence for the natural world. Jane Campion's 2009 film, "Bright Star", in telling the story of the romance between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), embodies these features enchantingly, with its adoring shots of the two lovers, of the flowers and trees constantly surrounding them, and the graceful unfolding of its love story. It preoccupies itself with the spontaneous expression of emotion, though restrained, making it a charming work worthy of the attention of any audience member, poetry scholar or otherwise.

Brawne is 18 years old at the opening, self-possessed, middle class, a prodigious flirt and devoted student of fashion, and Keats a 23-year-old writer, somewhat melancholy and seemingly idle, though he has moments of spirit and humour. She attracts his attention, and, after some minor misunderstanding over whether or not each likes the other, their fondness and attraction burgeons into a delicate love affair.