In Moffie, an English-speaking conscript with an Afrikaans surname has to learn how to navigate the army’s world of machismo as a gay man during apartheid.
South Africa
4.5*
Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Oliver Hermanus
Jack Sidey
Director of Photography:
Jamie D Ramsay
Running time: 100 minutes
Either you fall in line or you suffer the consequences. That is the message of the army and, let’s be honest, of society at large. If a recruit (or any other member of society) is brainwashed to believe that the fatherland should be defended even at the cost of sacrificing their own life, any resistance will seem like the work of the enemy. Those who are different, who cannot (or refuse to) toe the line and, therefore, hamper the development of a strong, homogeneous unit, become targets for removal.
In one of the first scenes of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie, a train the colour of blood is chugging along deep into the South African heartland. On the soundtrack, menacing strings with a Penderecki-like quality evoke a palpable fear. The year is 1981, the country is at war, and this cross-country railway is filled with adolescent flesh and bone – for the moment, still alive. Military service became compulsory for white South African men in June 1967 and was a practice that would last until shortly before the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994.
In the 1980s, scared of the danger of communism brewing in Angola, South Africa sent its young men to defend the ramparts. It was known as the South African Border War and was waged at the edge of the country’s mandate (colony), which it called South West Africa (Namibia). In many respects, South Africa amounted to a military theocracy whose authorities saw themselves and their purpose in biblical terms, and many of those fighting its war were Afrikaans boys around the age of 18.
In Afrikaans, “moffie” means “faggot”. Incidentally, those two f’s in the middle, which here emphasise the condition of being (in the eyes of the speaker) effeminate and therefore afflicted, also pop up in the Afrikaans equivalent of the n-word. For whites in apartheid South Africa, being in control while being a minority meant standing up to the majority. To do this required (white) machismo, and to prove one’s mettle, war – often considered the manly activity par excellence – was the perfect testing ground. Being a moffie, by contrast, was regarded as unmanly. These two characteristics came head to head during the war on the border.
More than half the film is set at a training camp outside the town of Middelburg, in the middle of nowhere. Upon arrival, the conscripts are (and continue to be) mistreated and humiliated to the point of being dehumanised. Most strikingly, they are called various epithets rooted in the titular insult and told that they have to transform into real men. In charge of this sadistic torture is Sergeant Brand (“blaze” in Afrikaans), who appears to take glee in the youngsters’ despair and exhaustion.
One of them is the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer). He is an outsider twice over: Among these dozens of Afrikaans boys, who speak the country’s language of power and authority, he is one of the only ones from an English family. He is also gay, as we can surmise from the opening scene when his father gives him a saucy present and he responds with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Lucky for him, he quickly finds Michael (Matthew Vey), another English boy, and the two bond over “Sugar Man” and, more superficially, being outsiders in this environment that values and promotes not only ethnic but also linguistic nationalism.
Before long, two young men with bloody faces are publicly paraded in front of their fellow soldiers. Nicholas hears they were caught kissing and then beaten up by a whole mob inside the camp. Now they are being sent off to the dreaded Ward 22. For the duration of the film, he lives in fear that this could happen to him, too. Meanwhile, everywhere he looks, he sees the straight guys touching each other and joking about their genitalia.
In the army, as in life, to be considered a man often means having to take part in a dick-measuring contest. And yet, this contest, by its very nature, vibrates with homoeroticism, as the Top Gun–inspired volleyball match reminds us. Hermanus adroitly conveys the confusion all of this creates in the young Nicholas, whose world becomes ever more complicated the closer he moves to what he desires.
At the same time, the training camp and its activities are designed to make the privates feel like children while scolding them for not behaving like men. This contradiction can only lead to conflict and combustion that many of these adolescent men simply cannot handle.
Hermanus’s debut feature, Shirley Adams, had a suicide. His sophomore film featured a rape in near silence. His third film had a triple murder followed by another murder. Although Moffie, his fourth film, also follows this trend (after all, it is a film about soldiers during wartime), even the moments of relative calm are rife with tension and the nauseating fear that such violence can erupt again at any time. The constant drumbeat of male-on-male violence and brutal macho aggression suffuses the narrative and thoroughly unsettles our experience of watching it.
The film proves the saying correct that mediocre books tend to make the best movies. The eponymous 2006 novel by André Carl van der Merwe has been completely overhauled, and the resulting adaptation is a vast improvement over the original text. Not only because the focus is much stronger but also because all the characters onscreen – even the most contemptible ones – have more nuance than their literary counterparts.
However, when choosing between showing too little or showing too much, Hermanus has consistently preferred the former. Unfortunately, this means that we get to know very little about Nicholas and his aspirations beyond his otherness. The intention may well be that he serves as a stand-in onto which the viewer can project their own stories, but this inscrutability does not always help to elicit our sympathy.
Apart from a peculiarly staged flashback (this is a memory, and there is no reason to highlight the continuity of time and space), we get no real insight into Nicholas’s life outside the army. It was a wise decision to forgo the novel’s multiple interludes into the past. However, the film is still stuck with this flashback that, clever as its depiction of a domineering but anonymous threat is, the director could have easily done away with altogether.
The film is a much more austere and melancholy portrayal of a white gay soldier in apartheid-era South Africa than Canary, which used camaraderie to alleviate the terror its characters experienced. In Moffie, there are no escape hatches. The flawless camerawork and the exquisite soundtrack (including Schubert’s “Piano Trio in E-flat major”, most famously used in Barry Lyndon but here countering the visuals in a jarring yet poetic way that would make Stanley Kubrick proud) do not portend a happy ending. In Hermanus’s films, the characters always end up having to negotiate a truce with disappointment. To survive, Nicholas will have to learn that, in the words of one Nobel Prize laureate who is cited in the film, “All I can be is me, whoever that is.”
With Moffie, Oliver Hermanus has seamlessly welded his stylistic ambitions to his raw material, shaping it to form – by far – the most elegant and coherently visceral film he has made to date.