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.
South 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.