South Africa

Die Kandidaat (1968)

André Crous

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.

The Beast (2016)

André Crous

Shaka does Shakespeare in The Beast, an excellently staged but very ambiguous, immersive yet enigmatic short film.

The BeastSouth Africa
4*

Directors:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Screenwriters:
Samantha Nell
Michael Wahrmann
Director of Photography:
Nicholas Turvey

Running time: 18 minutes

All the world is a stage, and we are merely watching the other players. Maybe that’s what happens in a comedy. But in a tragedy, we are also (unwitting, perhaps reluctant) players. And anyone who’s familiar with Funny Games will know that it can be frightful for the viewer to realise her implicit involvement in the spectacle.

The Beast is a short film set inside the pheZulu Safari Park, which is a real park in present-day South Africa. Here, tourists can see wildlife, walk around a “cultural village” with indigenous huts and witness traditional Zulu dances. What the (almost uniformly white) visitors find most thrilling, however, is the opportunity to see Shaka, the famous Zulu warrior who never lost a battle. Of course, it’s not the real Shaka, who died nearly 200 years ago. The imposing young man playing him (Khulani Maseko) is an actor who dreams of leaving this life behind and performing in a Shakespeare play at the National Theatre. Or does he?

Writing-directing duo Samantha Nell and Michael Wahrmann make the very clever decision to shoot most of their film in long, unbroken takes, which tends to imply a unity of space and time similar to what we experience in real life. The camera rarely makes itself known. Instead, it lets the action play out in wide shots that allow us to take in the actors and their surroundings. Among others, we get to know the aspirations of “Shaka”, who says he wants more than just to play the Bard’s famous dark-skinned Moor, Othello. Even though everyone we see is dressed up in costumes and moving around inside this Disney-like village, we are led to believe that these are intimate, “real” conversations between the actors.

But then, without warning, the film shatters all our illusions. And no review can do justice to the film without unpacking this multi-layered twist. The performers line up to dance and perform, presumably a traditional Zulu song. Shaka slowly separates from the group and takes up position between them and the audience. When he starts to speak, he speaks in Zulu. But the words that come out of his mouth are those of Shakespeare. More to the point, they belong to Shylock, the Jew, in The Merchant of Venice. 

We don’t see the audience for this performance, but it is because we are the audience. As a drum starts to beat offscreen, the drama increases, and Shaka switches to English to deliver the best-known and most aggressive portion of the monologue.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you offend us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that.
If a Jew offends a Christian, what is his answer? Revenge.
If a Christian offends a Jew, what should his punishment be by Christian example? Revenge.

By this stage, the rest of the group of Zulu performers have joined in, and as they reach the camera, their heads fill the frame. Just like Shaka’s famous bull’s head formation, the viewer is surrounded. Dead centre is Shaka, who now turns to look straight at us before delivering the final blow: “The evil you teach me will be difficult to execute, but in the end, I will better my instructor.”

At long last, we get a reverse shot of the tourists. Their jaws are on the floor. As a destabilisation of the expected boundaries between the spectator and the performers, this staging is very clever. It now seems clear that everything we have been watching – all the “private” conversations we were privy to, all the “behind-the-scenes” activity that we witnessed – was staged for us. We are the tourists visiting the film. Every moment and every action was merely part of a show, and we have not learnt anything about the individuals themselves. Perhaps we should have known better since “Shaka” is always in costume and is never called by any other name.

Unfortunately, those final words, which seem to create fear and provoke total confusion among the tourists clutching their phones like a security blanket, are too disconnected from the story to get a clear sense of what the actor is talking about. We can kind of grasp the metaphor of a struggle for equality. Jew–Christian can be replaced by black–white or indigenous–coloniser, but is this “evil” in the final line? Is the film really implying the possibility of another apartheid – one in reverse, in which blacks will dominate and enslave the whites? Is this merely a historical reminder that Shaka’s tribe, the Zulus, would ultimately take back power over this land? Or does it dovetail with Shaka’s desire to play “deep, ambiguous” characters?

With its series of impressively staged single takes and a powerful but puzzling ending, The Beast certainly stands out from the pack. The four scenes don’t fit neatly together, but with a powerhouse performance by lead actor Khulani Maseko, it almost doesn’t matter. This is Shaka’s show, and he hits the bull’s eye.

Moffie (2019)

André Crous

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.

MoffieSouth 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. 

Canary (2018)

André Crous

Canary is a coming-of-age film set in apartheid-era South Africa that also marks the coming of age of contemporary South African cinema.

Kanarie-CanarySouth Africa
4.5*

Director:
Christiaan Olwagen
Screenwriters:
Christiaan Olwagen
Charl-Johan Lingenfelder
Director of Photography:
Chris Vermaak

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title: Kanarie

Johan Niemand (literally, “John Nobody”) likes fashion, music and Boy George. But he lives in a small town in Christian-heavy apartheid-era South Africa, and it goes without saying that, for someone like him, the road ahead isn’t going to be easy. To make matters worse, we meet him fresh out of high school, just as he is called up to serve in the military.

A bit like its Pied Piper‒inspired opening credits sequence, Christiaan Olwagen’s Canary (Kanarie) is a flaming, mesmerising piece of work that viewers will have a hard time resisting. The film deftly navigates the minefield of recent South African history, littered as it is by racial segregation, religious supremacy and repressed sexuality. And it is the latter that features most prominently, although the film frequently chooses creative and insightful discussion over easy wins.

In that opening scene, two friends bribe Johan to walk down the road of their provincial and presumably conservative neighbourhood decked out in a big white wedding gown. We later find out he’s made a habit of doing whatever he can to earn money in order to buy LPs so that he can escape his surroundings, even just for a moment, by listening to his Walkman. It is a scene that seamlessly combines the fear of being different with the elation of imagining a world where you don’t have to fit in but others will join you in expressing yourself.

But expressing oneself in 1980s South Africa often meant being separated from one’s peers. Johan, played by Schalk Bezuidenhout (who, in what seems like another life entirely, is actually a moustachioed, curly-haired stand-up comic in his native South Africa), is conscripted just as South Africa is about to mark 20 years of ongoing conflict in neighbouring Namibia and Angola. War and manhood, then as now, are perceived as two sides of the same coin. Johan rightly assumes that his only way of surviving the dreaded “national service” is to be selected as a Kanarie – one of two dozen young men who form the South African Defence Force Choir and Concert group. To his utter relief, he makes it through.

Although slightly out of his comfort zone at first, he quickly bonds with two fellow Canaries: the camp but stout Ludolf (Germandt Geldenhuys) and blond, bespectacled fellow country boy, Wolfgang (Hannes Otto). They tease and support each other, particularly when they are verbally abused by their superiors.

One such superior is the young “Corporal Crunchie” (Beer Adriaanse), nicknamed for his copious consumption of the oat-based delicacy Ludolf’s mother packs for her son. Addressing the recruits as “ladies” is the mildest of the insults he hurls at them, which often include an array of ever more creative epithets associated with both male and female genitals. Loquacious and vulgar, the corporal is a slightly out-of-control version of Full Metal Jacket’s infamous Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and easily rises to the challenge of using words as weapons to emasculate his recruits, despite many of them having developed a thick skin after years of being bullied at school.

When the Kanaries go on tour and stay with host families, Johan and Wolfgang often share a room and grow ever closer, which gradually tears the soft-spoken Johan apart. Swinging between exhilaration and despair, he struggles to accept himself as he is convinced God will punish him for what he desires.

From the very first moments, Canary sets itself apart from the rest of the flock. The audacious decision to shoot scenes in single takes (or to give them the appearance of being shot as such) is both a blessing and a curse. Director of photography Chris Vermaak utilises his Steadicam to full effect to have conversations play out in a coherent, inescapable space. During Johan’s audition, the camera makes a seemingly impossible move as it appears to be drawn to the singing by passing through a table – the inverse of a similar shot in Citizen Kane.

However, while there is no question Olwagen gets to show off his talents as a director and the cast gets to flaunt their acting skills, the incredibly mobile camera can become distracting, if not downright repetitive as it pushes in or out on static action while panning and tracking on more mobile actions. The same is true of the recurring breaking of the fourth wall, which would have been more effective had it been used more judiciously.

By contrast, one of the most memorable shots is also one of the simplest: a single minutes-long close-up on Johan’s face that expresses everything we need to know and will strike a deep emotional chord with many a viewer, not unlike Ingmar Bergman’s similar approach to a rape scene in The Virgin Spring. Another devastating moment emerges out of the palpable tension of Johan and his sister trying but failing to address a serious topic as they sit shoulder to shoulder in a doorway and the camera has nowhere to go.

Above all, Canary puts onscreen some of the best acting ever shown in an Afrikaans feature film. For once, the actors don’t sound like they belong on stage and, unlike almost every single Afrikaans television series or feature film out there, no scene opens with people laughing at a non-existent joke. They are immediately recognisable as characters fully rooted in and representative of the real world, with their conversations having the colour and texture to make them both layered and accessible.

Tackling nationalism, religion and sexuality in a single film and doing so without veering off into the territory of self-congratulation or pontification is above most filmmakers’ pay grade, but Olwagen and fellow screenwriter Charl-Johan Lingenfelder stay close enough to Johan to allow us a sense of intimacy while pulling back far enough to take in his immediate context. He is the centre of attention in every single scene, and this first-person perspective, which includes many a music-video-style fantasy, boosts our empathy for him as he comes not only of age but of identity.

Christiaan Olwagen has made his material sing, and it’s as good a harmony as anything his characters belt out.

Viewed at the 2018 Cape Town International Film Market and Festival.

Sweet ‘n Short (1991)

André Crous

While some would correctly argue that the films of Leon Schuster, South Africa’s most profitable director, have done lasting damage to the industry’s reputation, his Sweet ‘n Short was a prescient work of art.

Sweet 'n ShortSouth Africa
4*

Director:
Gray Hofmeyr
Screenwriters:
Leon Schuster
Gray Hofmeyr
Director of Photography:
James Robb

Running time: 90 minutes

I never thought I would review a Leon Schuster movie, much less do so positively. Schuster is the candid camera king of South Africa, and for the past three decades, he has barely changed his formula: Stage outrageous situations, often with a racial undertone, then reveal the prank to the victim so that everyone can have a good belly laugh at being so gullible. His films are cash cows for the South African film industry, often spending their entire run at the top of the box office charts, but no one would describe them as paragons of cinematic excellence.

And yet, in the waning days of apartheid, during the uncertain time between the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Schuster wrote and played the lead in a film that used equal measures of comedy and intelligence so well that, one might reasonably argue, he played a significant role in assuaging white South Africans’ fears about the future and helped pave the way for a smooth transition to a post-apartheid era. That film was Sweet ‘n Short.

Schuster stars as the titular Sweet Coetzee, a 40-year-old TV sports broadcaster who has been with the station for half his life and recently received a service award. He spends the night celebrating, wakes up late, has to get dressed as he speeds down the highway and barely makes it to work on time before utter catastrophe strikes. Crestfallen, he takes to the casino, where he wins the jackpot, moments before an inept criminal crashes into him and sends him off to the hospital. When he wakes up, the world has changed.

Actually, it’s only South Africa, but during the apartheid years, it might as well have been the world. Most noticeably, the previous white/black hierarchy has been reversed, and in what might very well be the highlight of intellectual and comedic symbiosis in Schuster’s work, we see the country’s most famous Afrikaans news presenter, Riaan Cruywagen, read the day’s news in Zulu. It is difficult to emphasise how mind-blowing this depiction would have been to a white South African viewer in 1991.

There are many other sly additions that serve as a wink and a nod to the potential transformation that South Africans were anticipating once the whites would no longer be in power: Among others, the national rugby team’s name change from Springboks to Zambucks (Zam-Buk is a wildly popular antiseptic ointment in South Africa); the flamboyant South African “Shaka” war cry based on the New Zealand “Haka”, but with a local twist; and the renaming of the D.F. Malan Hospital in honour of the country’s first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Albert Luthuli.

Given the apartheid-era Communist Party’s long-standing support for the ANC, it should come as no surprise that Russian is quite prevalent in Schuster’s depiction of the New South Africa – from businesses advertising their goods in Cyrillic to them selling the traditional ushanka fur hats. But all of this is treated with a gentle chuckle, as if Schuster is seeking to re-assure a frightened white viewership that, even if the blacks and the communists got to run the country, its warm, friendly spirit would continue to triumph, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

One particularly prescient moment of screenwriting comes at the end of the first act, when Coetzee and Alfred (Alfred Ntombela, whose filmography overlaps almost perfectly with Schuster’s), his guide in the New South Africa, attend a rugby match. The match is preceded by a breathtakingly moving rendition of a new national anthem, written by Wendy Oldfield. Because it consists of lyrics in many of South Africa’s 11 languages, it conveys the kind of unity that such a hymn ought to produce, and the pride with which all the different races at the match sing it is simply extraordinary. It should be noted that the country’s new post-apartheid anthem ultimately also contained words sung in Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sesotho.

But like so many of Schuster’s other films, Sweet ‘n Short sees him dress up in blackface for the sake of getting a laugh, albeit at the expense of whites who get easily flustered and are made to look ridiculous because they are so obviously racist. Now clearly, this is quite different from the minstrel context in the United States in that racist whites are the butt of the joke here, but one can also easily make the argument that Schuster is reinforcing particularly egregious stereotypes of blacks by giving these caricatures any airtime at all.

Tackling a serious topic at a time when there was a great deal of worry in the country, Schuster and his director and co-screenwriter, Gray Hofmeyr, succeeded in creating an insightful (even intelligent) and comforting piece of entertainment that prepared his (white) countrymen and -women for the immense political and societal changes that lay ahead. But given the major role he plays in getting South Africans to the cinema, it is an utter tragedy that Schuster’s subsequent efforts have been skewed towards a much lower common denominator.

The Endless River (2015)

André Crous

A brutal farm murder leads to more questions than answers in third film by South Africa’s most acclaimed contemporary director, which stubbornly carves out its own path

The Endless RiverSouth Africa
3*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriter:
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Chris Lotz

Running time: 110 minutes

Don’t let the opening credits fool you: Despite the balmy, sunset-swept imagery – replete with cloud-stained skies of twilight and golden fields of wheat – that greets the viewer of The Endless River, the mood shifts very quickly as we witness a man’s release from prison, the murder of an innocent family and the two central characters’ near-futile search for post-traumatic meaning.

Oliver Hermanus’s third film is nothing if not ambitious: Using the tragedy of a farm murder to propel the narrative forward, this is simultaneously an examination of one man’s attempts to cope with his grief, a whodunnit and a woman’s yearning for affection. However, the presentation becomes more and more fragmented and ellipses ever more frequent as the film reaches a conclusion that is even more open-ended than that of the director’s previous film, Beauty (Skoonheid). The director is firmly in control, but as both content and meaning become elusive, dependent on that which is unseen (or rather, deliberately concealed), most viewers are unlikely to remain as attached to the material and the characters as they are at the outset.

The title nominally refers to the location, the small town of Riviersonderend in South Africa’s Western Cape, even though none of the characters ever utters the name. In this rural setting, we find Percy Solomons, a young man who has just been released after four years in prison. His petite wife, Tiny, who works as a waitress at a local diner, is optimistic about their future together, although her mother, whose house the three of them share with each other, openly shares her doubts around the breakfast table. The fabulous Denise Newman plays the mother, Mona, who is as proud and devoted to her child as was the case with the title character in Hermanus’s stunning début feature, Shirley Adams, whom she also portrayed; unfortunately, she is sidelined here halfway through the film.

Into this uncertainty tumbles Gilles Estève, a Frenchman with a murky past (a prominent ink stain on his thumb is never explained) who moved into a farmhouse just outside town about a year ago, although oddly enough he has not made any acquaintances. The film’s first major turning point is the murder of Gilles’s two young boys, and the murder and rape of his wife. This violent turn in the narrative only has extradiegetic sound in the form of Braam du Toit’s lilting score as a counterpoint to the horrific events on-screen. But while this artistic choice (not to mention the scene’s graceful camera moves) may appear peculiar at first, the purpose quickly becomes clear as the director’s intention is not so much to portray brutal realism as it is to attune us to the emotional journeys on which Gilles and Tiny embark.

Visually much less self-conscious than Hermanus’s previous film, which relied heavily on static or long takes, The Endless River has one robustly cinematic moment, namely the unbroken take in which we move ever closer to Percy as he makes up his mind whether to participate in a crime. Comparable to the opening shot of Beauty and a similar, albeit static, shot in Shirley Adams (although all three shots are strikingly different in their own ways, a variation for which the director deserves substantial praise), this kind of moment perfectly uses the visuals to unite the viewer with the character’s frame of mind in an unusual yet unostentatious way.

The strands of the film with which the director weaves his narrative are often strong but frayed at the tips, as we frequently have to guess how fundamental parts of the story develop. While this strategy of withholding crucial information from the viewer can help focus our attention and keep our minds active, it becomes annoying in the final act, when we seem to skip from one awkward dinner to the next while the action in between – which is of enormous importance in order to understand the film’s key relationship – is almost entirely left out of the film.

What hurts The Endless River even more, however, is the sense that Gilles, while visibly enraged at the police force’s seeming inability to solve the homicide, never thinks of his family beyond the fact of their murder. He shuts his past completely out of his mind to the point that he even refuses to look at a list of items taken from his home after it has been burgled. This may very well be his way of coping with loss, but there is not even one crack in this façade, which makes for a dramatically uninteresting character arc.

And yet, it is a testament to Hermanus’s talent as a filmmaker that we have the impression throughout – with the exception of that quick succession of homogeneous dinner scenes in the third act – that he is keeping a tight rein on the presentation of his material. Everything feels like it belongs to the same story, although, as mentioned above, one can fault him for not providing enough of the story to fill in the gaps that are as vast as the vistas in the opening credits sequence.

The film is like a jigsaw puzzle that we start constructing but realise halfway through that with every piece we place, another disappears from the box. Things will likely make slightly more sense on a second viewing, but there is a palpable, perverse decision on the part of the filmmaker not to meet the viewer’s expectations.

Hermanus does not make it easy on the viewer. Instead of coming together, the story appears to unravel more and more until we realise this is a road trip that will flow forever, reaching the sea somewhere far into the future and definitely happening – like so much else we want to know about this story – offscreen. Some may find this refreshing, but given the early development of the story, most are likely to regard it as unnecessarily defiant.

Beauty (2011)

André Crous

A secret obsession that inevitably leads to tragedy is presented in a film moving at a pace and according to a poetry wholly at odds with the life of its main character.

skoonheidSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriter:
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Skoonheid

There is no question that the man at the centre of Oliver Hermanus’s Afrikaans-language Beauty is deserving of the title every bit as much as the director’s previous, début feature, the stunningly executed Shirley Adams, was about its title character. His name is Christian Roodt, and he is a charming law student whose enigmatic aura intensifies as we realise he has a calmness about him that belies his age and his boyish good looks. It is a persona that sets others at ease and unfortunately allows some people to take advantage of his affability.

One man who sees Christian and cannot get him out of his head is François van Heerden, a friend of Roodt’s parents, who first sets eyes on the young man at his own daughter’s wedding. But even though the title refers to Christian, Hermanus gently nudges us, from the very first moment, to take position next to François, whose gaze the camera shares with us in the opening take.

This particular take – long and produced via a slow zoom in – is a masterstroke, as it not only sets up the extended takes that mottle the film’s visual landscape but also gorgeously encapsulates both the distance and the longing of the main character that will inform our understanding of the rest of the story. Unfortunately, the editing spells out whom this perspective belongs to before delivering the gut-punch of having the object of affection unexpectedly look straight into the camera and thus catching François (and us, already) in flagrante delicto.

The film creates some of its tension by deploying moments of lingering silence, and lead actor Deon Lotz is excellent at conveying the frustration and the inhibition of a middle-aged, homophobic man who is married to a woman but engages in sex with other men on what we assume is a regular basis (the farm orgies in which he participates are depicted as emotionless and decidedly ugly). This father of two daughters, who lives in Bloemfontein, deep in the South African heartland, likes to drink beer and watch rugby. He represses his secret until there is no more space, and it ruptures his bubble of existence.

But exactly when there ought to be tension, there is none, as happens in the third act when an inebriated François, sitting opposite Christian at an empty diner, cannot stop babbling. We learn nothing, we feel little for him, and we end up feeling sorry for the expressionless, passive Christian who has to listen to this man. And yet, this scene immediately follows a tour de force tracking shot inside a night club that shows us how ill at ease François is with the world of gay men who have accepted their own sexual orientations.

Visually, Beauty is unimpeachable (although the shots themselves may be questionable, as I explain below), and director of photography Jamie Ramsay deserves much acclaim for his stunning, crisp compositions. The intention behind the film is equally noteworthy, as the story of a man whose secret of homosexual attraction ultimately almost destroys him is one that is absolutely necessary for a generation growing up on a staple of mostly uncritically positive depictions of gay characters and lives.

It is not an easy film to watch, as Hermanus’s view of humanity (and particularly of his main character) is unflinchingly pessimistic, and François does not get a moment to relax and be happy. He is always either delusional or suffering because of his desire to get closer to Christian. He doesn’t know what he wants exactly, but he finds himself drawn like a moth to a flame. A comparison to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, or The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, would not be entirely inappropriate, as the obsession of saving someone who does not wish or need to be saved is central to understanding the character here.

Another reason why Beauty is a difficult experience is because of its contemplative pace, which is not always useful. While the few long takes that project François’s point of view have a clear purpose, others are used less sparingly and are more taxing for the viewer. For example, why do we have to be subjected to a static shot of more than 15 seconds of a dim kitchen, shown in the early morning hours, before a character arrives to do something as captivating as… buttoning his shirt?

Hermanus’s plan to have the viewer slide in and out of François’s position is executed a bit ham-handedly, as Christian sometimes looks straight into the camera (which happens briefly in the opening scene, and at least once more later in the film), but he also looks just past the frame, and at the end, he is replaced by another character who looks straight at us/François. This mishmash signals confusion on the part of the director, who nonetheless handles the rest of his material very assuredly, like an illusionist whose tricks barely engage but still intrigue us because we cannot discern exactly how he performs them so seamlessly, fooling us every time.

In this tragic tale of a man whose unrequited lust leads him to revert to the most primitive of behaviours – fitting the stereotype of the macho guy taking, nay violently grabbing, what he wants with utter disregard for the other party – we are urged to share his point of view, but there is little for us to empathise with. The mood is sombre throughout, and Hermanus’s pitch-black vision of his protagonist’s existence never draws us in through the participatory experiences that small moments of happiness would have brought.

Not a thriller and not really a character study, Beauty’s redeeming characteristic is its director’s firm hand, but a collection of technically flawless pieces does not a great film make. Slow cinema, which this film at times intends to emulate, is the domain of poets whose messages are related to us as dreams that are visionary and not just visual. Beauty, by contrast, has a story with precious little to chew on and that ought to have been told in the most immediate manner possible.

This is a beautiful film that sometimes carefully considers and depicts the life of a man whose secret is slowly devouring him, but the story’s loose ends and the director’s persistent determination to obfuscate instead of answering our questions cannot hide the fact that there is less going on here than there ought to be.

The Miracle Worker (2012)

André Crous

The Miracle worker Die WonderwerkerSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Katinka Heyns
Screenwriter:
Chris Barnard
Director of Photography:
Koos Roets

Running time: 121 minutes

Original title: Die Wonderwerker

Feelings that remain unspoken can turn into a festering mess. The Miracle Worker, about a peculiar man who turns up on a farm in the north-eastern part of South Africa at the turn of the 20th century, at that time still a British colony, shows how tension can become a fissure when even the gentlest bit of pressure is applied.

The farm is “Rietfontein”, the year 1908, and acclaimed Afrikaans poet Eugène Marais pulls up at the front door of the farmhouse, out of breath and very thirsty, his piercing grey-blue eyes hauntingly asking the woman of the house, Tamaria (or often just Maria) van Rooyen for some water. As usual, she is a little nosy, but when he insists, she turns into a lovely hostess, running to get the water herself and offering him a bed to sweat out what he says is malaria. In fact, it is not malaria, and he ultimately stays much longer than just the night.

Maria’s husband, Gys, is the head of the household by virtue of his gender, but it is clear from the start that Maria runs everything in the house and even admits that Gys doesn’t do anything without her say-so. However, she is far from being in control, and while she has issues of her own, she also turns a blind eye to her son Adriaan’s continual sexual harassment of their adopted 19-year-old Jane. When Gys tells her Adriaan is too horny, she retorts with, “At least he has some balls.”

In that single brief exchange, a great deal of character is revealed, as Maria not only indicates that Gys should pay more attention to her, but also that her own desire for affection has blinded her to the suffering inflicted on a girl in her care, under her roof, by her own son.

Maria is by far the most interesting character in the film, despite its focus purportedly being elsewhere: The title refers to the wily Marais, whose presence on the farm leads to all kinds of bizarre encounters with wildlife. Maria is played with grace and determination by actress Elize Cawood, who seems to simply slide into the role, her dialogue never coming across as contrived or affected. The same can be said of Marius Weyers, who plays Gys, although the character is unfortunately much less complex. As a matter of interest, I’ll note that Cawood and Weyers — well-known figures in the South African film and television industry for more than three decades — also appeared as husband and wife in The Fourth Reich.

The Miracle Worker is different from the Ross Devenish’s 1977 film The Guest, a film whose scarce availability stands in direct contrast to its acclaim as perhaps one of the best South African films ever made, in that the struggle with addiction – frighteningly, graphically obvious in the latter – is all but absent from Heyns’s film. While Marais’ addiction with morphine is an important thread in the plot, Heyns doesn’t show us how the poet managed to cope with a dwindling number of morphine pills, rationed out by Maria, and therefore the title character remains an enigma throughout, perhaps making him more iconic but certainly making him less accessible.

And yet, there are tiny, almost transient, hints that he has had pain in the past he would like to forget. Dawid Minnaar, who plays Marais, communicates this deep pain, or loss, by not answering certain questions posed by the curious Van Rooyens while remaining almost entirely transparent about everything else except the drugs. The psychology of the characters is mostly opaque, and we don’t learn until very late in the film what is going on inside the heads of Maria and Marais. While they eventually say what we have been thinking all along, Maria’s revelation in particular in poignant and is made by an actress who has to bare her soul and admit she has aged. It provides for a stunning moment that is perhaps one of the strongest in Cawood’s entire career.

This is the first film by director Katinka Heyns since Paljas, released in 1998. She has directed a number of television episodes since then, and unfortunately, it would seem that the television style has taken over completely, as demonstrated by the almost exclusive use of medium shots and close-ups to tell the story. Never a particularly visual director, her stories have usually benefited from rich landscapes, from the forests of the southern Cape in Fiela se Kind to an enormous sand dune in Die Storie van Klara Viljee to the arrival of a circus in a small railway town in the heart of the arid Karoo region of South Africa in Paljas. 

The Miracle Worker does little to draw attention to the vast landscape of the Bosveld that surrounds the farm, and it is equally unwilling to use the camera in a way that either focuses or captures our attention. The cinematography is boring and forgettable, with the one exception of a scene of hypnosis, in which a character dances with a broom, that is shot as a reverse Steadicam shot in a single take and stands out from the rest of the film, though it is far from being especially creative.

The film’s bookend structure with scenes in Pretoria in 1932 doesn’t work, not only because we know in the opening scenes that, whatever happens, Marais will survive his ordeal on the farm and eventually meet up with the young Jane again in the future, but because it forces a very unnecessarily descriptive voice-over onto the viewer throughout the film, because the story is not told in the present but as something that happened in the past.

However, the relationship between the 19-year-old Jane and the nearly 40-year-old Marais is beautifully portrayed as something Marais himself acknowledges as a confused struggle to deal with the past, and it is a struggle with which he knows he never copes particularly successfully. The emotional pieces of the puzzle start to fit together by the end of the film, though it is unfortunate that Adriaan is never really examined and comes across as a simpleton, a simplification rejected by his curious eyes.

Marais is charming and knowledgeable, and his interactions with baboons provide the viewer with a greater appreciation of these primates. However, despite the acting talent on display, the film never truly overcomes Heyns’s inability to tell a story with any kind of cinematic flair; going by the visuals, it sometimes seems like she is bored with the material. That is a terrible shame.  As with the silence of the characters, her voice is cold and distant, but luckily the landscapes in the background, the ones she tries to keep out of the frame, make their way into the spirit of the film and end up enriching our experience.

The Fourth Reich (1990)

André Crous

The Fourth ReichSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Manie van Rensburg
Screenwriter:
Malcolm Kohll
Director of Photography:
Dewald Aukema

Running time: 183 minutes

South Africa’s most expensive film to date brought together the cream of the country’s film industry to tell the real-life story of Robey Leibbrandt, an Afrikaans boxer turned revolutionary, who was planning to assassinate the country’s pro-British prime minister, General Jan Smuts, shortly after the Second World War broke out.

Originally shot as a television series before being edited down and screened across the country to tepid public interest, the film ultimately wound up, two years later, on the country’s television screens. The Fourth Reich had an estimated budget of R16 million ($6 million at the time, around $10.5 million today, which is an enormous figure for a South African film; by contrast, the 2005 Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi, was made for $3 million). It is evident that a large amount of the budget was spent on set design and costumes, but the film also benefits from being shot on location very often, and the South African countryside, with its wide-open spaces and pre-war dirt roads, is well represented in this film.

The film opens in Berlin during the Olympic Games of 1936, where South African boxer Robey Leibbrandt is recruited by the German government when they learn of his affection for the National Socialist Party’s ideology and his admiration of their leader. “The Führer has created a miracle. That’s exactly what we need to happen in South Africa.” He spends the next few years training in Germany, until Germany invades Poland and Britain declares war.

In South Africa, the people’s state of mind at this time must be framed within the context of events at the turn of the century: South Africans had fought and lost against the British in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and even after becoming the Union of South Africa in 1910, a British colony, many South Africans still had little affection for the Crown. Shortly before WWII, the “Ossewabrandwag” (literally, the Ox-wagon sentinel), an ultra-nationalist organisation, was formed to resist cooperation with the British. However, General Jan Smuts, who was the country’s deputy prime minister at the time, opposed Prime Minister J.B.M. Hertzog (who advocated neutrality towards Germany), stating that, “in war, you are either friend or enemy”.

After Smuts defeated Hertzog in this matter, he was appointed Prime Minister and became an instant target for the Ossewabrandwag, who disliked the British as much as they idolised the German ideologies of nationalism and antisemitism.

The Fourth Reich focuses on Robey Leibbrandt’s preparations for the assassination of Jan Smuts (Louis van Niekerk, made up to look exactly like the general), and on the policeman whose assignment is to track down Leibbrandt before he can carry out his mission: Jan Taillard. In the first hour of the film, these two men’s journeys (and in particular, their gestures) are intercut in a way that binds them together. Ultimately, however, it is a German woman, Erna Dorfman (very often accompanied by the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2), whom they both encounter, who will introduce them to each other and play an important role in the development of the narrative.

Taillard is a very competent but badly mannered policeman; when he is called to Pretoria from his home in Queenstown, his wife kindly advises him: “Try and follow orders this time…” The mission, which he chooses to accept, requires him to locate whoever is planning to assassinate Prime Minister Smuts, without breathing a word to anybody, including his dutiful wife, Romy (played by Elize Cawood, whose voice is both golden and vulnerable). In the meantime, Leibbrandt sneaks into South Africa via South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) and seeks to incite members of the Ossewabrandwag to join him in overthrowing the government by committing acts of sabotage on power and railway lines. The faithful are asked to swear a blood oath with the following words, by Henri de la Rochejaquelein.

If I advance, follow me
If I retreat, shoot me
If I die, avenge me.

Ironically, de la Rochejaquelein had been a Royalist in eighteenth-century France, allied with the British to fight against the post-Revolutionary republican government with the aim of restoring the monarchy.

Ryno Hattingh’s performance as Robey Leibbrandt is commendable, but he is given too little to do. The man has to be charismatic, and while the character tries to emulate Adolf Hitler’s elocution when he makes important speeches, the result is not very moving; often he is presented as arrogant and the film does not seek to delve much deeper into his character. On the other hand, as Jan Taillard, Marius Weyers brings a quiet self-confidence to a very human character whose secret mission to defend the prime minister destabilises his life and alienates him from his family.

The film was clearly meant for television, as people usually speak in close-up and storylines that should have been left out completely in the theatrical version show up as unsatisfactory snippets, for example, Leibbrandt’s arrival in the Sperrgebiet of South-West Africa, of which a single scene survives, with actress Wilma Stockenström, that doesn’t lead anywhere. Another very bad moment comes early in the film when Frau Dorfman has a passionate encounter with Leibbrandt: While they make out in slow-motion, actress Grethe Fox’s otherwise stone-cold face is contorted and it seems like she is in agony, and yet the foreplay continues.

It is regrettable that director Manie van Rensburg chose to make a film in English, spoken by a cast of mostly Afrikaans players who all have a very recognisably Afrikaans accent. While an anti-British South African identity does not necessarily imply that the speakers be Afrikaans, it becomes difficult to suspend disbelief when English is used as the lingua franca between members of a very Afrikaans movement such as the Ossewabrandwag.

In the closing credits, the filmmaker seems to acknowledge that the film was made to rehabilitate the reputation of Jan Taillard, whose hard work to protect General Smuts was disregarded by the post-war Nationalist government. The film itself is a very good depiction of life in South Africa in the early 1940s, including the influence of Nazi politics on South Africa during this time, and it is always a pleasure to see individuals such as Smuts brought to life on-screen. The Fourth Reich was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a South African director in his own country and while the film struggles to overcome its television origins, it is a marvellous reminder of the beauty of the South African landscape and the narrative possibilities that the country’s history offers to filmmakers.

A Reasonable Man (1999)

André Crous

South Africa
4*

Director:
Gavin Hood
Screenwriter:
Gavin Hood
Director of Photography:
Buster Reynolds

Running time: 101 minutes

The South African A Reasonable Man is a carefully executed investigation into the importance of tribal or traditional beliefs in a country that sees itself as Western-oriented. The screenplay takes great care to handle the material sensibly, demonstrating the significance of the past in the present, and highlighting the fact that non-Western beliefs should not be dismissed out of hand, for they too have a role to play, however “unreasonable” their basis might be in the eyes of the law.

The film opens in Angola in 1988, during the final years of the South African Border War. South African soldiers arrive in a tiny village where they find nothing but abandoned houses. The squad separates and a young Sean Raine goes to hide in one of these houses. When a closet door creaks, the tense Raine unloads his gun on the flimsy plywood door. What tumbles out of the closet will haunt him for a long time.

Ten years later, having recently returned to South Africa after spending a decade abroad with his wife, Raine meets a young cowherd named Sipho in a village in the Eastern part of the country known as Kwazulu-Natal. Sipho is found with a bloody hatchet in his hands, while a woman clutches a one-year-old baby in her arms, its head split open. Sipho swears that he was only trying to kill the “Tikoloshe” (or “Tokoloshe”, as I know it), an evil spirit, and not the baby. Luckily, Raine is a lawyer, and because of his experience in Angola, he decides to give the boy a chance and chooses to represent him in court.

But “Tikoloshe” is not a word that anybody takes kindly to – except Sipho and a witch doctor (or “sangoma”) who would help rid Sean Raine of his demons from the past – and it seems unlikely that the boy, who admits to having swung the hatchet, would be judged innocent. Hearing this case is Judge Wendon, whose initial surprise at Raine’s refusal to let his client plead insanity defence slowly morphs into a more accommodating view of the young lawyer. Starring as Judge Wendon is Nigel Hawthorne, who brings a very welcome combination of compassion, wit and judicial solemnity to the role.

At the centre of the film, however, is director Gavin Hood himself, who is cast as Sean Raine, a man whose big clean-shaven face is innocent yet shimmers with conviction and perseverance. The film is as much about Raine’s personal story as the criminal proceeding, for he feels that he would finally be freed from this “snake deep inside” if he manages to assure Sipho’s acquittal.

Now, it is made clear that Sipho took a hatchet and struck a baby in such a way that the baby was killed. Sipho believed that it was the Tikoloshe, but the steadfastness of one’s beliefs has nothing to do with the law, as Judge Wendon makes very clear in his comparison of Sipho’s beliefs with those of mass murderers and historical figures such as Hitler and Stalin.

Hood’s screenplay flows very well, although its desire not only to meet the audience more than halfway but to spell everything out in overly informative sentences sometimes seems quite contrived. Sipho’s character has to be a bit of an enigma in order for the film to exist, but the lack of interaction between him and Raine, as well as the complete absence of the mother of the murdered baby, left me wondering whether Hood was not too interested in his own character.

The film makes an interesting analogy between Christian and tribal beliefs, including the ever-popular metaphor of Christ’s blood and body, and in this regard, Hood is successful in introducing his audience to customs that might be foreign to them. Hood’s choice to make the state prosecutor a black advocate and himself, a white man, the representative for the defence of tribal beliefs, is very interesting and provides this film with a much richer texture than it would have had otherwise.

The implications of an imbalance, in the eyes of the law, between Western and non-Western morality is hammered home a bit too forcefully, but in the end, the film survives its examination of social and religious customs and certainly provides ample material for discussion afterwards. The courthouse is in Pietermaritzburg, in South Africa, a town whose licence plate designation is NP. Perhaps this is a coincidence. But, considering the film’s attention to detail, perhaps it isn’t.