The canvas for this 2009 production is the proverbial Cape of Storms (Cape Town’s Mitchell’s Plain, in this instance) where the social, political and religious tapestry of life is replete with innumerable human paradoxes and ironies that are no different from any other parts of our presently seething, searing and teeming world of astounding technology and changes in the patterns of human behaviour.
Sadly, the viewer has glaringly been denied a more empirical and insightful depiction into the social fabric of township life - which is only one of many gripes that I have with this film. For starters: surely with a glittering array of joint budget production houses in the making of this movie such as: Centropolis Entertainment; the London Film School; Dv8 Film - in association with the industrious NFVF and the generous South African Department of Trade and Industry, better locality shots and more camera-work to give flesh and substance to the environment from which the storyline has been drawn including better sound and boom facilities, would have vastly improved the overall quality of the film. I often found the starkly-in-the face photography to be highly meddlesome and obtrusive - almost as if the director Oliver Hermanus was deliberately imposing an element of close-up proximity on the viewer - visa-à-vis the tiring ordeal that the mother, Shirley Adams (played by the highly experienced and celebrated South African actress, Denise Newman) and her justly embittered paraplegic gunshot-victim son, Donovan (Keenan Arrison) were under-going. French audiences are said to favour that style of camera-work, but it did not work for South African movie-goers. I’m told that the film did not do well on the local circuit.
The ordeals that are depicted in the film are not new to me nor is the story – I have been (and still am) an active part of the world of the physically challenged for more than 40 years – and, in my opinion, the production fails to graphically drive home the challenges which some people in the paraplegic community experience daily (if that was the veiled intention of the writers and of the production team). Too much of the material is implied in the movie – which, if some key references such as the scene of the agile, fast-running boy-child's visit to the beach in the company of his parents - against the backdrop of placid waves and a congenial surroundings - had been dramatised rather than being told by his mother, I sincerely believe, we would have witnessed a better production.
I readily admit that age has caught up with me, and that for the record I am also going deaf in my right ear. The left ear is totally dead. It must be that, because even after having pushed the sound decibel to 100-plus at times, I could not clearly discern certain poignant remarks made by the characters – especially those between an irate and ill-disposed Mrs. Adams and the apparently pedantic university student helper Tamsin Ranger (Theresa Sedras) who is curtly and coldly dismissed at the door of the Adams home when she (inaudibly, to me that is), enquires after the circumstances of Donovan's drowning.
"He would have died anyway", the mother retorted, banging the door in the empathetic student's face. And, without sounding too esoteric, it struck me that some times in this life, all the efforts and sacrifices we may make to better the lives of those we say we love, often become acts of futility. That is the tragic consequences of this movie: a suicidal Donovan's drive-by shooting by the son of his mother's friend; the now (totally clichéd) but implied absence of an errant, uncaring husband and father; the suspicion and mistrust of the well-meaning; the daily frustration of being psychological pilloried at attempts to acquire medication for the ill, without prescription; the demeaning level of thievery that a woman has to sink to in order to provide for her child - those stirring experiences, in themselves, constitute having to live on the thresholds of futility, in my humble books.
The sense and the reality of futility abound in our land, our continent and in the world as we think we know it. Surely, those who have been inspired and blessed with the ability to imagine and create stories, movies and plant pieces of memory that will bloom and bear the fruits of a human experience which teaches, chides and fills others with the deep yen and the zeal to also create that which uplifts themselves as well as others, to heights beyond the ordinary pales of hope and dreaming.
And, has that story been ably told and dramatised; I think not; in fact, it has failed dismally - budget constraints, if any, aside. That too brief but chilling spectacle of the distraught mother rushing frantically to her son and finding him drowned - that scene alone, had the makings and the propensity with which to tug and jerk at the human heart in the mould and mode of a the late Lana Turner's tearjerker, 'Madam X' as well as in the old London Films production of now-dead sage, Alan Paton’s stirring classic 'Cry, the Beloved Country' (A story of Comfort in Desolation) and in other movies too numerous to count.
But aah; as they say in the much-vaunted world of critical commentary one must not ignore the good. The birthday party, where free, untrammeled laughter and almost with reckless abandon, won it for me as being characteristic of the culture of the Mother City's 'dormitory people'- Kariema (Lee-Ann van Rooi) and her hubby, Kariem (Travis Snyders) brought enough merriment to warm any house of sadness and pining and lift the ominous cloud of uncertainty that hung over the ill-fated Adams household.
Enough said.
Cast: Denise Newman, Keenan Arrison Director: Oliver Hermanus Screenwriter Stavros Pamballis and Oliver Hermanus Producers: Jeremy Nathan and Michelle Wheatley Executive Producer: Roland Emmerich
