More than 50 years after its release at the height of apartheid, Jans Rautenbach’s Die Kandidaat has lost none of its bravery nor any of its razor-sharp comedy.
South Africa
4.5*
Director:
Jans Rautenbach
Screenwriters:
Jans Rautenbach
Emil Nofal
Director of Photography:
Vincent G. Cox
Running time: 100 minutes
During the nearly 50 years of apartheid in South Africa, Afrikaans was the language of authority. In terms of power, the country belonged to Afrikaans whites first, then to English whites, then to no one else. When Die Kandidaat (literally “The Candidate”, although the film never had an English title) opened in 1968, the turmoil from abroad broke on the African shores, and the result was a breathtakingly robust manifestation of artistic resistance to the staid and seemingly stern status quo of segregation. All without featuring a single non-white character.
The director, Jans Rautenbach, was all of 31 years old when he directed this, his first film as a solo director. Boiling contemporary Afrikaner society down to nine representatives on the board of a big Afrikaans company, the Adriaan Delport Foundation, he exposes factional infighting and uncertainty with seriousness, insight and generous helpings of comic relief when conservative and progressive viewpoints are pitted against each other.
These representatives, in whose company we spend most of the film, are:
- Lourens Niemand, businessman and chairman of the board
- Paula Neethling, the founder’s daughter (and apparent socialite)
- Reverend Perholdt from the Dutch Reformed Church
- Anna Volschenk, head of an Afrikaans women’s organisation
- Herman Botha, farmer
- Prof. Hannes van Biljon, proponent of the Afrikaans language
- Wilhelm Esterhuysen, carpenter
- HP Greeff, deputy secretary in the civil service
- Anton du Toit, writer
The nine board members are tasked with protecting and propagating the culture and alleged values of Afrikaans speakers. They are meeting to choose a new CEO, and according to the charter, their decision has to be unanimous. But the boardroom is not a homogeneous entity, and people’s views – however slight the difference between them – easily create divisions.
The titular final candidate for the position is Dr Jan le Roux (Roelf Jacobs), an outwardly strait-laced member of society who runs Seunsdorp, a reform school for teenage boys who have lost their way. The board’s chairman, Lourens Niemand (Gert van den Bergh, who died on the eve of shooting his final scene), and Paula Neethling (Marié du Toit), who wields extraordinary power even though (or because) she is the late founder’s daughter, are adamant about pushing the nomination through as quickly as possible. Their strategy is to allay their fellow board members’ fears with a mere wave of the hand. But one of them, a writer called Anton du Toit, has done his homework. Not only does he want to undermine Paula’s authority for personal reasons, but as a writer of the Sixties movement, he wants to stir the pot. And stir it he does.
Before long, he recalls that the foundation’s regulations require that the CEO be a “genuine Afrikaner”. This ostensibly innocuous moniker quickly leads the nine decision-makers to discuss the label’s applicability to those who do not fit the stereotype. In a country where “Afrikanerness” rests on so many different pillars, the latter’s various definitions can overlap each other rather imperfectly. Are so-called coloured South Africans (of mixed heritage), most of whom speak Afrikaans as a first language, also Afrikaners? Are white speakers of Afrikaans who do not belong to one of the main Protestant denominations? And those who do not follow the governing National Party? And those who have an English spouse?
These questions quickly create division among the members, thus pointedly indicating an unspoken division within white South Africa, too. In a couple of brilliantly timed moments of levity, the arguments even escalate to fisticuffs. Despite the glossy veneer of the boardroom, with its stained glass windows and statues of Afrikaans heroes (according to the government of the day), these men and women can still grab each other by the throat when they get hot and bothered by a viewpoint they don’t share. But while Du Toit is the one stoking the fire, it is the eloquent albeit slightly uptight Le Roux who serves as the flint.
Rautenbach’s opening credits sequence cleverly depicts this symbolism. A series of static shots showing statues made of stone turns dynamic with the appearance of Le Roux. In fact, his arrival appears to have a material effect on the camera. The initially immobile frame suddenly embarks on a whirlwind of a semi-circle movement. The rest of the sequence consists almost exclusively of shots obtained by either moving (tracking shots) or swivelling the camera (pans).
The scenes in the boardroom are a bit of a one-man show, with the heterodox writer, Du Toit, asking all the taboo questions. But we know he is right, and therefore, we are always on his side. His anti-establishment streak also clearly targets the board’s two most powerful members, Niemand and Neethling.
Neethling is the one with the most authority, however, and her outfits both emulate and rival those of Cleopatra. By contrast, Niemand, whose surname literally and very appropriately means “nobody”, is a vacuous embarrassment. Throughout the film, he is slow and completely befuddled, loses his train of thought and cuts a pathetic figure when he puffs on his cigar. He is a pushover for whatever Neethling wants, and we realise right at the end that she was blackmailing him all along. As a symbol of the upper echelons of power in Afrikaans society, his character is a devastating indictment of the absence of direction at the top.
The action is set almost exclusively in just two locations, but what Die Kandidaat lacks for in breadth it more than makes up for in depth. And while the scenes in the board room are the most daring, half the story concerns an evolving tragedy at Seunsdorp, and we gradually come to realise how the two tracks fit together both narratively and thematically. One of the boys gets injured while spraying chemicals outside. A troublemaker and hardened criminal, Izak, who instigated the incident, fingers a shy classmate, Kallie (Regardt van den Bergh), as the culprit. There is a diversity of thought and character here among the Afrikaner boys, too, and it is not always easy to label any of them as either good or bad. Once they are branded as a problem, however, as someone who doesn’t belong in society, they carry that label with them for the rest of their lives, like a skin they can’t shed.
In this regard, the discussions at the foundation are fundamentally related to the ups and downs of these boys on the fringes of society. As a former member of a youth gang, Le Roux is the perfect bridge between the two worlds. Far from the modern art and the book-lined walls of this bubble of Afrikaner superiority, he has a much more practical approach to spreading the gospel of Afrikanerness.
But the many skeletons that tumble out of the closet in the board room are a thing to behold. Through their slips of the tongue, naïveté and revelations of closely guarded secrets, we discover many of the supposedly upstanding representatives of Afrikaner society are, in fact, human, after all, and differ from each other, even if that is the last thing the government wants. We learn that Neethling’s late husband, the previous director of the foundation, was a true disaster. We learn that she jilted Du Toit for Le Roux, and he abandoned her for someone else, although the film’s timeline is a bit muddled. Greeff’s wife speaks English. Le Roux is engaged to an English-speaking South African, and she’s Catholic, too. Niemand has the biggest secret of them all, but it is the arch-conservative Mrs Volschenk who gives the film its most priceless moment in an exchange with the controversial Du Toit, whose literary work she considers indecent:
Volschenk: You can’t tell me anything about “life”! My husband and I travel abroad quite often. Last year in Paris, I also encountered your “sex”. All of a sudden, these… girls… started chatting to my husband out on the street. It was terrible. I was so shocked that my husband put his foot down and ordered me to head back to the hotel at once to calm down. The poor man. He didn’t return to the hotel until several hours later.
Du Toit: I bet he was very tired…
Volschenk: Well, naturally.
Rautenbach builds on and vastly surpasses the entertainment of King Hendrik, a political comedy released three years earlier and directed by Emil Nofal, who co-wrote and produced Die Kandidaat. King Hendrik, set in a South African town that was never fully incorporated and, thus, decides to declare independence, trod carefully around (but didn’t completely ignore) hot-button issues like apartheid and Afrikaans–English relations. For Nofal, the drama of division was a source of comedy rather than reflection, but in Die Kandidaat, Rautenbach strikes the right balance by intensifying the drama while letting the lighter moments bubble to the surface when appropriate to reinforce the drama.
More than half a century after its release, Die Kandidaat remains an extraordinary piece of political cinema, especially because the questions it poses about Afrikanerness have never been adequately answered. It never feels like the work of a first-time director with too little life experience or who is trying to say too much. On the surface an inquiry into the slippery definition of an Afrikaner, it offers an honest appraisal of Afrikaans society, warts and all. It is a film that likely would not have received any support from the Adriaan Delport Foundation. But there’s no making a masterpiece by simply playing by the rules, and pushing the envelope can often get the message further.