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FFrom an external perspective, South African cinema tends to advertise through occasional films rather than consistently visible directing careers. In the 1980s, The Gods Must Be Crazy was a worldwide success that didn’t do much to raise the profile of its director, Jamie Uys. Fourteen years ago, the gritty fable of the Tsotsi people won the country one of its first Oscars, only to send director Gavin Hood straight into a competent but culturally anonymous Hollywood career.
In Oliver Hermanus, however, the country has produced its most important author in several generations. Capetonian, 36, studied at the London Film School, but returned home for his art. Her 2009 graduation film, Shirley Adams, a tough-minded portrait of mother and son set in the Cape Flats, set the tone for a career marked by worldwide critical acclaim. He approached Cannes with his follow-up, Beauty, a surprising study of a locked up Afrikaner who hit theaters in the UK; his third film, The Endless River, did not.
Moffie, Hermanus’s fourth poetic but visceral characteristic, feels like the one that will consolidate him in the canon of contemporary art. A war film that returns to Beauty’s eager and strange terrain, it has been collecting awards and applause, including three nominations for the British Independent Film Awards, since its premiere in Venice last fall. However, it is his most pristinely accomplished film yet, at least in its conception, not the most personal: it adapts André Carl van der Merwe’s 2006 semi-autobiographical novel, based on his experiences as a gay teen recruit sent to fighting in South Africa Border Warfare in the early 1980s.
A gay director born after the events depicted in the film, Hermanus was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring a ruled kingdom denied to men of color in the apartheid era, while finding common ground in the suffering of his white protagonist locked under a vicious Afrikaner patriarchy. “The issue bothered me at first,” he says from his home on the outskirts of Cape Town, where he isolates himself under the coronavirus blockade. “It was my mother who really said to me, ‘Why make another movie about white men in apartheid South Africa? “
“But the challenge is finding the center that fully resonates with you. And for me, that became not only the character’s sexuality, but the shame factor: the fact that under this regime, boys were ashamed of becoming a certain type of man. Because we keep asking the question, especially in South Africa: where does our toxic masculinity come from? When I looked at it that way, when I saw this as an exploration of our past that informs our present, I felt more comfortable with it. ”
Van der Merwe’s novel had a more defined romantic line; Although the Hermanus film depicts an attraction between protagonist Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) and a misfit fellow recruit, he deliberately downplayed the love story. “A key rule of mine from the beginning was that there would be no conventional love scene of any kind: it wasn’t going to be a relationship drama,” he says. “It would be more about our connection to this troubled era and the generation of men who lived through that.”
In doing so, Hermanus was prepared to be confrontational, taking the book’s title, a common Afrikaans anti-gay insult, as his cue on that front. “I know it is a very triggering movie, it had to be,” he admits. “We have had an overwhelming variety of reactions to the film in South Africa: some of gay men who had been in the military and felt identified and recognized, some of men who do not necessarily recognize the fact that they are still traumatized.” A member of the press had a panic attack at a screening. These are common experiences, but have not been widely addressed in South African culture. “
Although the film is set in the white-only military domain, Hermanus spares no representation of violence against blacks: “I know it was a dangerous choice for all black characters to be physical objects, victims of the fringe. But it did: there is a white gaze there, and we needed to see that. “He quotes inspiration from Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2010 historical drama Black Venus, which depicts white objectification and abuse by South African black artist Saartjie Baartman, with a divisive effect.
Hermanus is prepared to reject the point of view he has taken, but he does not see South African cinema evolving through the glove treatment of his own ugly history. “The challenge in the South African film scene right now is that there still seems to be a lot within racial boundaries: white money making nostalgia for white people lacking black people, and then there are black filmmakers making romantic comedies and genre movies about black lives, “he says. “The movies I make really don’t exist in that market. And then I didn’t want to make a safe movie like Long Walk to Freedom, where you get everyone’s perspective on everything.
“So I decided that we would put the world in the headspace of white South Africa in the 1980s, to show what that looked like from the inside,” he concludes. Moffie vividly and hauntingly delivers on that promise: Hermanus continues to make films that feel as stimulating and urgent to locals as they do to international viewers.
