Tag: South Africa

Misbehaviour

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

One of the great achievements of the British historical drama Misbehaviour is that it recreates a single event on which two separate stories hang. The 1970 Miss World competition coincided with the rise of not only the nascent women’s liberation movement but also increasing international unease with South Africa’s Apartheid regime. The pitfall awaiting anyone writing a script about all this (or directing one) is that it means constantly walking a tightrope, getting the balance right so that justice is done to both intertwining narratives. It is to Misbehaviour’s great credit that it manages to pull off this difficult feat.

On the one hand, Women’s Lib activists would disrupt the ceremony with flour bombs after claiming it was nothing more, nothing less than a cattle market. On the other, there were two entrants from South Africa, one white, one black. Although the London-based Miss World was a popular annual event begun in 1951 which by 1970 had become a regular fixture in the television calendar, it was open to charges of both objectifying women and tending to favour white winners (notwithstanding the fact that Miss World 1966 was an Indian, a fact omitted here).

The two narratives are very much an insider’s and an outsider’s view of the contest. The insiders are the organisers Eric and Julia Morley (Rhys Ifans and Keeley Hawes), their special guest star Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) and his savvy wife Dolores (Lesley Manville), and last but most definitely not least the contestants, most notably favourite-to-win Miss Sweden (Clara Rosager) and two black contestants Miss Africa South (Loreece Harrison) and Miss Grenada (Gugu M’batha-Raw). The outsiders are the Women’s Libbers, an Islington collective headed by force of nature Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) joined by University College London history student Sally Alexander (Keira Knightly) who gets volunteered into becoming the group’s press spokesperson for TV talk shows.

The presence of two Miss South Africas represents a shrewd strategy by Eric to avoid an anti-Apartheid boycott of the contest. He and his wife are putting on a show / running a business and trying to make everything go like clockwork. The white Miss Sweden can be seen chafing against the establishment nature of the event while the two black girls are glad to be there but convinced neither of them has a chance of winning. Dolores Hope, meanwhile, is well aware her husband has an eye for the ladies and Manville’s astutely observed performance makes it very clear that she not he wears the trousers in their relationship.

The pleasures on offer here are many. The script is clever, the casting smart, the production design spot on. Articulate and intelligent student Sally is seen sidelined by male tutors and students purely on the basis of gender, told for example that to write a thesis on female workers is ‘niche’. All this fuels her as the token protester on panel discussions at the oh so establishment BBC. She is also the one who gets Jo and her fellow protesters to dress down so that when they turn up with tickets they won’t get refused entry to the contest. Kinnear exudes just the right of smarmy charm as celebrity Hope. Ifans generates a seedy respectability as instigator and organiser while Hawes as his wife comes across as a shrewd businesswoman who won’t stand for any nonsense and sticks up for the contestants.

From early close ups shots of 1970 ladies’ boots, shoes and dresses through creches with men looking after the kids for their female activist partners to the interior of the Princess Theatre where the contest takes place (presumably the real life location the Albert Hall wouldn’t give permission for filming), you feel like you’re back in the London of 1970. (I speak as one who was a pre-teen in London at the time: watching it felt like I was really back there again.)

Director Lowthorpe brilliantly pulls it all together in a film which understands the issues as they were then and as they are now. It may be hard for today’s twentysomething feminists to understand what the world was like at that time, but this film will give you a pretty accurate idea of not only the fashions and the complicity, but also the rebel mindset that started to take it all apart. As a title at the end mentions, the Patriarchy still needs taking down one event at a time. Wherever your head is at, watching Misbehaviour is a good place to start.

Misbehaviour is out in the UK on Friday, March 13th. On VoD from Wednesday, April 15th. Watch the film trailer below:

Meerkat Moonship (Meerkat Maantuig)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Teenager Gideonette de la Rey (Anchen du Plessis) doesn’t like her name. In fact, our protagonist is convinced her unusual moniker carries a curse. Her father, the pastor of a small church, he assures her there’s no such curse. But then one day he’s found dead in the church building.

Gideonette is obsessed with the curse and begins writing a list of ways it might cause her to die. Her alcoholic mother (Hanlé Barnard) finds out and forbids her from looking at the list.

When her mother checks herself into a hospital “for some rest”, Nettie, as she prefers to be called, moves in with her grandparents Willem (Pierre van Pletzen) and Koekie (Rika Sennett) whose farmhouse is surrounded by countryside where she meets a younger boy Bhubesi (Themba Ntuli), a mute, who with the help of her grandfather is building a giant spaceship in the shape of a meerkat so that he can blast off into the stars…

The above probably sounds completely bonkers. But it’s really hard to do this film justice simply by talking about its plot. So much else is going on, not least the exquisite cinematography which lend many of Nettie’s scenes, some of them walking through vegetation in sunlight, an ethereal dreamlike quality.

This is a film about coming to terms with your past and letting go of fear in order to move forward. And then there’s the fact that this is a South African movie set in a loosely defined time presumably while the country was still under Apartheid, in which this writer, for one, kept wondering where all the black people were.

Well, the mute Bhubesi is black, as his briefly seen mum, and while the white Nettie’s relationship with him is quite odd, it doesn’t seem to be so much about race as about friendship for someone who needs a helping hand. Which both these characters do in their differing ways.

For the finale, all the hitherto hidden black people finally appear alongside the white Nettie and her grandparents with a feeling of different colour skinned people getting along together and moving forward. And of Nettie finding herself in this new context. A wonderfully and thoroughly subversive little film which deserves to be widely seen.

Meerkat Moonship played in the Schlingel International Film Festival where it deservedly picked up the Fipresci jury prize.

Vaya

Posted on by victorfraga

A large city such as Johannesburg can be threatening and overwhelming not just for foreigners, but also for South African people coming from smaller and more remote places. The film begins on a train journey from the coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal to the largest city in the country. Three strangers are blithely unaware that their destinies will promptly weave into a dangerous fabric, and their mundane existence will morph into a far more eventful predicament.

The first character or this urban journey triptych is Zanele (Zimkhitha Nyoka), who’s taking a little girl to meet up with her mother. The second is Nkulu (Sibusiso Msimang), who has been tasked with bringing his father’s corpse back to his hometown for a burial close to his family. Thirdly, Nhlanhla (Sihle Xaba) moves to the big city in the hope to quickly amass large sums of money. Their plans almost immediately go awry, and they are caught up in a net of corruption, violence and criminality. The people who they meet seem to lack kindness and solidarity, and the trio too begins to change and adapt surprisingly fast.

Vaya has some shocking twists, absurd in their ruthlessness. Even the most vicious acts become trivial, in a city which has banalised greed, corruption and violence. You will hear about the most ludicrous reason ever for not being able to retrieve your father’s corpse for a funeral, and will see a hitman react to his job in the most unexpected way. In a nutshell, you will witness three naive souls descend into urban subversion. But will they get out of it? Will they embrace the changes?

The most spectacular element of Vaya is its cinematography. Smooth yet striking aerial shots of Johannesburg punctuate the narrative, reminding viewers of the grey and sterile environment in which the action takes place. Images of a landfill at the end of the movie deserve special mention. The photography of the actors is also very convincing, successfully capturing warm and vivid black skin plus profound and expressive dark eyes.

Vaya has its heart at the right place, and an interesting script, too. The problem is that the actors are not strong enough to support the convoluted narrative. It attempts to be some sort of South African gangster movie, with plenty of rap music, but it’s unlikely to have a strong appeal outside the continent. Or perhaps it will, at least at festivals. The South African gangster flick U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Mark Dornford-May) snatched the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival 12 years ago. Which raises a recurring question: are films from countries such as South Africa and Brazil doomed to depict violence in order to be successful abroad?

Vaya showed at the 67th International Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK during at the Cambridge Film Festival, in October.