Oliver Hermanus

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. 

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.

Shirley Adams (2009)

André Crous

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Stavros Pamballis
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 90 minutes

Shirley Adams is a proud woman trying to cope as well as she can with her domestic situation. Nine months before the film starts, her teenage son, Donovan, had been hit by a stray bullet while he was returning home in a crime-ridden low-income area of Cape Town, South Africa, known as the “Cape Flats”. The incident left Donovan paralysed, a quadriplegic. A few months later, Shirley’s husband abandoned them, never to be seen again. From time to time, they do receive an envelope with some money, but Shirley never questions the origins of the support, having accepted the responsibility of caring for Donovan all on her own.

In the film’s harrowing opening scene, which takes place in the dead of night, the camera nervously hovers over Shirley’s shoulders while she tries to resuscitate Donovan; he is unconscious, and foaming at the mouth, and in the following scene, in case we couldn’t guess, a doctor tells Shirley that Donovan had tried to commit suicide.

Shirley has devoted herself to the well-being of her only child, but Donovan, who is frustrated by his own helplessness and ashamed at being cared for (his mother has to wash him in the bathtub, an event that Donovan considers the ultimate form of his own debasement), is already in a downward spiral – and his suicide attempt at the beginning of the film is a good indication of how low his self-image has fallen. As a result of his own demons, and probably without any cruel intentions, Donovan lashes out at this mother, and their relationship clearly suffers because of his apparent ingratitude for her help.

The word that best describes the film’s camerawork would be “intimate”. Director Oliver Hermanus and his DP, Jamie Ramsay, tend to show the events from behind Shirley and this stubborn focus on intimacy can cause some frustration in a viewer who – admittedly, by convention, but with good reason, in my opinion – expects an establishing shot now and again. However, despite this unrelentingly close experience of events, a number of self-conscious shots in which we only see the back of main actress Denise Newman’s head, and a story that is very simple, first-time director Hermanus succeeds in gripping his audience thanks to his self-assured direction that steers the film away from any fake sentimentality. His approach is entirely appropriate for the story he is telling, and it is plain to see that the film was a labour of love.

Shirley Adams does not contain any picturesque views of the Mother City (the locals’ nickname for Cape Town), but the accents and the slight shifts between languages make it a very clearly defined story from South Africa; at the same time, it seems odd to label it a South African film, not merely because it mostly eschews any mention of politics, but because, frankly, the country has never before produced anything like it. If any specific influence is to be discerned, it would be the films of the Romanian New Wave: The film contains a number of single takes, but one shot in particular, which occurs during Donovan’s birthday, is very reminiscent of the famous shot around the dinner table in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Hermanus’s Shirley Adams is an example of exceptional filmmaking and ranks amongst the best films his country has ever produced.