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.”

Dancers in the Dark

“La La Land”

La La Land is a ludicrous and a laborious film. It’s the work of Damien Chazelle, who previously gave us the grotesque sadomasochistic psychodrama Whiplash, and plays as ineptly on the subjects of music, musicians, art, and artistry as that earlier film did. Where the two leading figures in Whiplash were each a pile of clichés working tirelessly on performances of mediocre jazz numbers, the two leads in La La Land are empty shapes painted in bright artificial colours and emoting through unexceptional Broadway poperatic ballads. The film is explicitly a tribute to the plastic-coloured musical reveries that sprang up in the 50s and 60s, during the final great blast of energy at the death of the classical Hollywood system; a mixed bag of overt allusions is made to Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, Top Hat, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and other films. But Chazelle – though he works frightfully hard for it, and though that labour shows on the screen – does not have the sensibility of style and of wonder that made each of the works he obviously loves so memorable.

The trouble starts in the very first shot, which turns out to be a long tracking shot that appears to last for at least five minutes, right through the opening number, “Another Day of Sun”. In it, a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway turns into a song and dance routine. Drivers dressed in monochrome pastel colours jump out of and leap over their cars, mugging chaotically for the restless camera. A show is made of the tracking shot and how well-timed, well-placed, and well-coordinated are each of the dancers, yet the impression given is not of the geometric precision of sequences in classic musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or 42^nd Street, but of the strenuous work and rehearsal that went into it. The dancers’ beaming smiles don’t evoke the joy of performance and of artifice, but preen at their technical achievement and conspicuous exertions. The self-satisfied multiculturalism of this opening scene feels contrived and then insulting as it yields to the whites-only love story of the film.

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.

My Oscar Predictions

This year’s Academy Awards face a slightly unusual circumstance: more people than usual will be watching the results keenly to see how the nominated individuals fare, but, perhaps, (hopefully), more people than ever before have also realised how trivial and irrelevant are those results. Following a few months of political tumult, and in the midst of a global uncertainty in just about all regards that matter, people who care about movies know that there’s no consequence in who the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think gave the best supporting performance, or which film they think was photographed best. Award names like “Best Picture” and “Best Actress” have always merely been the Academy’s homonyms for the actual best film and actual best lead performance by a female actor in a year; any concurrence between superlative artistic merit and industry recognition has always been strictly coincidental; statistically, the two matters are mutually independent.

But this year there’s increased attention on the results, because, for one, the Academy has managed to nominate films and individuals that resonated more deeply through the culture than recent years’ selections, and because viewers understand that Oscar success, while fatuous and meaningless in itself, is a marvelous help to the career of many film-makers; if the movies and individuals we love win Academy Awards this evening (tomorrow morning before dawn in South African time), they’re likely to be given both more opportunities and more freedom in making the kinds of movies they feel strongly about. For example, Martin Scorsese went through the routine struggles of making the feature films and documentaries he dreamed of making, and ran into the usual kind of financial and creative obstacles that plague directors in the system; but since he won his Oscar in 2007, for The Departed, he’s found much greater freedom in Hollywood to bring his grand visions to exhilarating, sublime realisation, and that freedom has shown in the three films of his that have been released here (Shutter Island, Hugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street) that was markedly missing from all his previous films.

A Winter’s Tale

“Manchester by the Sea”

Kenneth Lonergan’s appreciation for and apprehension of music is made lustrously clear in his new family melodrama Manchester by the Sea. Not only does he movingly and thoughtfully use classic Baroque works by Handel and Albinoni (and the soothing tones of Ella Fitzgerald) to enhance his drama in certain scenes, but the very images through which he transmits that drama are carried by an inherent musical lilt. Lonergan is better known as a writer than a director – he is an accomplished playwright and, in addition to those of each of the three movies he directed himself, has written the scripts for other films, including Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York – but his artistry in directing this film (I have not yet seen You Can Count On Me and Margaret) is manifest and expansive. Beyond his mastery of the formally classical crafts and techniques he employs – his fixed compositions, broad establishing shots, clean movements, bright lighting, inconspicuous editing, credible dialogue and performances, definitive narrative structure, measured pace in unfolding the story, et cetera – there is a spark of ardour and originality to what we see on the screen, and it carries all the force of emotion and strength of substance that any film artist could bring to his or her work.

Manchester by the Sea stars Casey Affleck as the sullen handyman Lee Chandler in a large town in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, whose brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), in the thrall of a chronic heart condition, suffers a heart attack and dies in their home town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a few hours’ drive north along the coast. Lee is left with making all the arrangements for Joe’s funeral and afterwards, most importantly looking after his nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). To Lee’s alarm, he learns that he has been designated Patrick’s guardian by Joe in his will; the prevailing crisis of the remainder of the plot is the tug between Lee, who is anxious to leave Manchester-by-the-Sea as soon as is proper, and Patrick, who is adamant that he will stay just where he is and continue his life in its current vein. Subsequent scenes survey the scope and dimensions of that vein: Patrick is comfortably set in a group of friends, the devoted lead guitarist of a comically earnest high school garage band, and is self-satisfied in the attention he draws from his prettier classmates, including Sandy (Anna Baryshnikov) and Silvie (Kara Hayward, Hedges’s entrancing costar in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom).

Hell on Earth

“Hacksaw Ridge”

I’m given to understand that Mel Gibson is a rather devout Roman Catholic, and, if I were to judge that before this month from the only movie he has directed that I’d seen, I’d quite believe it. Besides anything else a viewer may say about it – and millions of viewers have had their say and much more – The Passion of the Christ looks to me like a sincere article of the ardent faith of a genuine believer. The finer details of that doctrine can’t really be discerned from the film, and probably shouldn’t be surmised from Gibson’s regrettable personal statements and actions, but there is one thing we were all made absolutely sure of by The Passion of the Christ, in ways that would never let us forget it: In Gibson’s worldview, human faith (of the kind he practices) and brutal violence are indissolubly linked in the immense suffering that each causes mankind. For Gibson, as necessary and rewarding as it is, faith brings tribulation and its force is met with a proportional ferocity in the violence (physical or psychological) one inevitably encounters.

As repellently violent as The Passion of the Christ is, Gibson managed to illustrate quite effectively the broader points of that worldview. His narrative, rather than demonstrating anti-Semitic biases, paints all humans (except his main character, of course) as inherently sinful, guilty, unworthy of God’s favour, and deserving of harsh punishment for their sins, which brings about a blazing contrast with the grace and mercy of Jesus, who undergoes just the kind of horrific scenes of torment and agony that grip Gibson’s imagination – and reinforce his ideas of man’s sinful nature – to deliver a remorseless human race from an even more remorseless judgement. With this kind of narrative underpinning the central doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, it isn’t surprising that such tight bonds are drawn by so many Catholic artists between the notions of faith, guilt, and suffering, nor that the personal expression of Gibson’s religious convictions turned out as so off-putting to such large numbers of viewers. His obvious sincerity, allegiance to doctrine, and determination to cinematically represent those ideas explain its enormous success among equally large numbers of viewers.

The Year in Movies – 2016

2016 was not an excellent year for this blog. It’s not because I didn’t see many movies that I loved – on the contrary, I saw some of the greatest movies of my life, and a fair volume of them – but, due to a growing number of more pressing priorities, my duties on The Back Row were neglected, and I didn’t get the chance to share those elated experiences here.

Just about everyone else on the planet has already released their round-ups of 2016, and I’ve had a look at each of the movie pundits’ choices for the top films of the year. The results have fortified my conviction that the best thing for cinematic tastes to be is unruly and uninhibited. What one first notices looking through these lists is that many films are being hailed in London and New York that we haven’t had the faintest whiff of yet in South Africa; this is just a distribution and scheduling discrepancy. But what one notices next is that, besides a few differences in ranking and an oddball choice here and there, pundits and mainstream media critics are making all the same choices for their favourite films, and those choices converge closer and closer each year. One is led to believe that many critics are just as susceptible to hype as mass audiences are, only their hype is generated at film festivals and press conferences, instead of being stoked by trailers and supplementary merchandising.

What struck me while I surveyed these consensus choices on the masses of lists and polls (which I’ve compiled for you at the bottom of this post) is that the objects of this hype so rarely align with what I would consider commendable artistic achievements. Few lists contain more than a single film that I loved, and many don’t contain even one. It’s not a huge surprise to me; I read the reviews of my favourite movies throughout the year as I saw them, and saw quite quickly that the movies in which one viewer locates rapture and daring, many others find only confusion and obscurity. What I consider the greatest film of 2016 – Terrence Malick’s Hollywood reverie Knight of Cups – was designated “rotten” on the website Rotten Tomatoes (as useless a cultural phenomenon as any website could be) with a score of 45%, and Woody Allen’s crime comedy Irrational Man scored 44%. In terms of mainstream movie releases, not many people went to see either of those two films, and not many that did loved them. This in itself doesn’t discourage me – Malick and Allen have long been working in ways that don’t rely on commercial success and critical adulation, and their careers will continue without hindrance – but it is dismaying to see how many people think a movie must be good just because of the number and stations of others who say that it is. True appreciation of the cinema, just as success in the various realms of one’s life, depends on your capacity for imagination and independence of thought.

Lost in Space

“Passengers”

Having been introduced to 2016’s sci-fi scene with Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival – a shamelessly manipulative, undistinguished rumination on how we should think beyond our paradigms, and work peacefully together towards common ends – and having seen only The Imitation Game from the same director – which I found to be both pretty dull and grossly prejudicial and narrow-minded – I dreaded Morten Tyldum’s next film, Passengers, set in space in the near future and starring Hollywood leads Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. I can now report that dread is not the appropriate or required response to the film; however, nor are relief, elation, wonder, applause, thrill, or just plain pleasure. Passengers is more interesting than Arrival: the sentimentality is hard earned, rather than cheap, and the melodrama has a solid base, rather than being base itself. But the main event of the plot – i.e., the action that sets off the questions of who did what to whom and why, of which the trailer offers no hints, and which I won’t be giving away here – and the ethics it entails are so repellent that it’s difficult to imagine any serious endorsement of the film, despite its few merits and strengths.

Tyldum shows himself here to be a master of technical film-making; every scene – every shot, in fact – works perfectly to illustrate the progression of the narrative, the frames of mind of the characters, the implications of the action, the stakes and risks of the choices at hand, and the time and place of each moment within the setting of the film. Pratt and Lawrence hit their emotional markers like bull’s-eyes, rendering the emotional state of their characters with maximum clarity, and precisely marking the characters’ turns within a scene from one emotion to the next as the plot points are reached and developed. Michael Sheen, who plays a bar-tending robot of advanced artificial intelligence, manages an uncanny blend of calculated humanistic warmth and calibrated casualness in delivering lines that were ingeniously devised by the film-makers as just what a bar-tender that runs on gears and algorithms would say to a customer. The script, by Jon Spaihts, is painstakingly designed to withhold and reveal information at just the right moments, to effectively and efficiently envelop you in the characters’ backgrounds, and to move the plot at paces alternating between coherently brisk and romantically deliberate. The angles and editing give well conceived and full views of the action in each scene: what goes where, what’s coming towards whom, what the imminent dangers are, and how everything is positioned in relation to everything else. I was reminded of 2015’s popular action film Mad Max: Fury Road, so rationally and coherently filmed that you could plot a detailed map from the consecutive shots.

The Conjuring

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”

The keenly anticipated prequel to J.K. Rowling’s hefty private school saga begins with shrieking newspaper headlines, indicating shock and distress on the part of the wizarding world’s media intelligentsia. If there were a more fitting outset to a blockbuster opening worldwide in November 2016, I can’t think what it could be. In a society whose politics and culture coil closer together and intrude more abruptly on one another each passing day, it’s impossible for the mainstream media not to reflect itself and its hysterias more frequently, however unconsciously this is done. The effect is heightened by the fact that the script for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, unlike each of its Harry Potter predecessors, was written by Mme. Rowling herself, a prominent personality both in popular culture and, increasingly, in political discourse. One highly doubts she’d ever pass up the opportunity to weave her own hot take on current events into a major Hollywood feature.

And one would be proven right when one sees the film. Rowling is a first-time movie writer, and the film language she employs is not so much richly symbolic or ironic, as it would be in a high allegory, as it is plainly metaphoric. One sees what she means and respects her right to say it, sensing that one is hearing blunt parables and moralistic fables during a bourgeois dinner party discussion rather than watching the creations of a potent imagination, committed to celluloid and projected in a dark theatre for expectant thrill-seekers.

The studies on racial discrimination and class struggles in the wizarding world, and how it parallels our own, became tedious somewhere in the middle of the Harry Potter film series, and reached a grand summit of banality with the fascist iconography and rhetoric in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. Not quite satisfied that the full potential of the subject was fulfilled, Rowling has elected to focus the central struggle of her new series on the same issue. In this film and the four that shall follow it, the main villain is a nasty wizard named Grindelwald (you’ll have heard of him briefly in the two Deathly Hallow films), once again bent on exalting the pureblood wizarding race over all non-magical people, and bringing the wizarding world out of hiding, if only so that it can entrench and lord over a muggle underclass. How is he different from Lord Voldemort, then, you may ask. For one thing, he’s a properly formed human being, with suitably Aryan platinum-blond hair, instead of a contoured, serpentine English Patient; for another, speculation and rumours abound that Grindelwald is the feverish former lover of Professor Albus Dumbledore. Merlin’s beard! One awaits with a new avidity Dumbledore’s familiar injunction: “Wands out!”

The Dream Factory

“Me Him Her”

I wrote before that to have a gay best friend is an inordinate privilege not enjoyed by nearly enough people in the world. It is not to be discounted, however, that it is also an ennobling responsibility and that crucial requirements are made of the affection, loyalty, and resourcefulness of those on whom this is bestowed. Best friends bear a significant duty to one another and it is during times of challenges – such as the flurry of crises that break out when one comes face to face with his sexual orientation – that their fellowship is tested and, if it succeeds, fortified.

Dustin Milligan plays Cory, a blithe young drifter in denim shorts and with a week-old beard whom we first meet in the stall of a public bathroom, in the directorial debut of the young Hollywood local Max Landis, cheerily named Me Him Her. Cory is the best friend of Brendan (Luke Bracey), a straight-acting Hollywood superstar who finally (months after leaving college) figures out that he’s gay, and even then it’s only because he’s kissed a boy and liked it. Brendan, duly bewildered at his discovery and thoroughly puzzled as to what to do next, both personally and professionally, enlists his homie’s help and flies him to Los Angeles for support and guidance.

No sooner has Cory landed and piped out his first squeal of excitement, however, than he earns a cautionary behest from Brendan never to let himself wander or cut loose in Los Angeles. “L.A. is like a giant jigsaw puzzle someone forgot to assemble,” Brendan informs him; “the pieces are laid out all over the floor.” To venture into the gaps, he insists, is to place yourself in the way of significant risk. What kind of risk – physical, psychological, financial, existential, sexual – Brendan neglects to say; it seems he isn’t so sure himself. All he can tell us is that “things get weird”.