Spit & Polish: 25 March 2012

Audiences want to see the rainbow, not the storm that created it

I was browsing through the forthcoming movies for the next few months, and was surprised to see that on the Disney schedule, we have the new Leon Schuster movie, Mad Buddies, opening in June. Schuster and Disney? How did that come about?

Well, in recent years, the Disney Corporation has established a strong presence in SA, and they take careful note of what South Africans love, and Leon Schuster is one of the country's favourites.

In Mad Buddies, Schuster has gained a new partner in comedic crime, in the shape of Kenneth Nkosi. The film is not going out under the Disney label, but that hardly matters. When two of the country's top funny men team up, money will appear - and Schuster makes a lot of it.

But what about the rest of the South African films, especially Afrikaans movies?

There are a few movies, such as Roepman, that are ambitious and subtle, looking back to the 1960s, to a closed Afrikaans middle-class community, dominated by religion and tradition. The film shows the tough choices that had to be made to break down the old political and social structures, and it captures that time superbly. It is beautifully handled, but very few people bothered to see it.

What people do want to see in Afrikaans films is a focus on a young, middle-class, affluent community. The stories tend to be youthful and romantic in films such as Liefling, Hoofmeisie and Semi-Soet.

They portray the current situation of the young urban Afrikaner, with a strong focus on romance, careers and the ever-handy romcom template to provide a cute touch. As I watch these films, they kind of melt into one pretty, lightly comic dessert.

I cannot help remembering those wonderful movies made by the Afrikaans filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1980s. Katinka Heyns made great movies - she starred in Katrina (1969) and she directed Fiela se Kind (1988) - films so powerful that the Nat government of the time tried to ban them. They were important films that defied the old censorship laws and created a space for new ideas.

That doesn't happen much anymore. The current crop of South African films, the ones that are distributed nationally, seem to have bailed out of any sense of the real, current history of our time.

A great movie, The Bang Bang Club (2010) was a box-office flop because it stirred memories of bad times in our country. That violence eventually led to our Rainbow nation, but right now, audiences want to see the rainbow, not the storm that created it.

Hoofmeisie came out this year and it exemplifies where commercial film in this country is headed. It's about three schoolgirls and their clinging moms who go all-out to make sure that their daughter will become the school's head girl.

Hard on its heels is Semi-Soet, a chick-flick about a bunch of young professionals who work in a small ad agency. The leading lady hears that there's a hostile bid to buy her company by a secretive rich man known as "The Jackal".

Does anyone who is in business in 2012, really negotiate with a secret buyer called "The Jackal"? Even in a romcom that sounds tacky, but the producers go right ahead. In the process, the characters end up in a luxurious vineyard where: a cream-pie is smashed into a face; a romance is faked; somebody has a weird piggy-back ride; and a real, angry pig rampages through the vineyard.

It's that kind of nonsense we see, repeatedly, in a dozen other movies. The salient point is that there is a ready audience for that kind of film. Semi-Soet was a profitable hit and that's how South African producers make their money and I say, good for them. They found a formula that has worked for decades and they know their target market and they know how to make money out of a movie.

But wouldn't it be nice to see something a little more challenging?

Have you ever seen an Afrikaans film about a serial killer? Or a film about the issue of abortion? Or a thriller about the Brett Kebble murder or the murder of the Teasers boss?

We read these stories in the papers. Fascinating books are published and they become bestsellers, but why does nobody think of making an Afrikaans thriller, a tough, contemporary crime drama that plays out on the streets and in the drug cartels?

I think it's because producers have found a comfortable, compliant audience who like romantic fantasy and, let's face it, it's their money and as long as they get good return, why should they take risks?

They give audiences what they want. They go for a profitable soft option. There's nothing wrong with that, but teenage movies vanish as rapidly as a teen romance, and I wonder if these complacent producers have a viable alternative.