Spit & Polish: 29 September 2013

Oh shucks it's another brilliant local film that hardly anyone went to see

I received an e-mail from a student, signed "J Saayman". He works as a journalist for the University of Pretoria's newspaper, Perdeby. He and a colleague are writing an article on the South African film industry over the past few years and he asked for my opinion on the state of Afrikaans cinema in this country.

My answer is that there is a huge divide between filmmakers who take films seriously and those who just sling films together, mostly comedies, that make enough money to show a good profit so they can just move on to their next money-maker.

There have been a few remarkable local films, such as The Bang Bang Club (2010), the wonderful Otelo Burning (2012) and the impressive Material (2012). There are also great movies that deal with the heritage of Afrikaans filmmaking.

Also in 2012, there was Die Wonderwerker, made by Katinka Heyns with Dawid Minnaar playing the role of poet Eugene Marais, which was extraordinary.

Another great source of quality is Spier Films in the Cape, which has made great movies such as Roepman, the excellent Boer-War epic Verraiers and Of Good Report, perhaps the most-talked-about South African film of the year.

I was also interested in Die Laaste Tango because it was so beautifully and honestly shot in the Karoo, even though the ending got a bit silly. Most recently I saw an interesting film called Die Ballade van Robbie de Wee, which told the intriguing tale of a music promoter, played by Neil Sandilands, who has lost his career and his life.

His greedy wife kicks him out of the house and, in a pub, he sees a young singer, who is spectacularly handsome and who also writes and performs his own compositions.

He signs the boy but then he realises that there are much deeper issues with this artist.

It was directed by Darrell Roodt, who has apparently re-gained his film skills.

Those films suggest that there is a shrewd, interesting and unique film culture evolving in this country - which brings us to Molly en Wors, a feature film based on the popular TV series of the same name.

The makers of all these films would have turned to the Department of Arts and Culture, headed by Minister Paul Mashatile, which must decide which proposals will get financial backing and which will end up gathering dust on someone's desk.

It stands to reason that every film-maker thinks their film will be great, but Molly en Worsis absolutely dire - yet I will bet it will make more money than any of those other films I have just listed.

Perhaps you are not familiar with this family. There is Wors (Willie Esterhuizen) and Molly (Lizz Meiring) and their two children, Blapsie (Karien Botha) and Vaatjie (Gerhard Odendaal), who has a pregnant girl-friend Shardonay (Cherie van Der Merwe).

Wors runs F1 Fitment Centre in Johannesburg, where cars are sent to be repaired. But their lives change when Wors wins a trip to Amsterdam.

A great deal of confusion ensues, which involves a terminally dumb air stewardess, who is supposed to take a large stash of drugs to Amsterdam. But she gets cold feet and dumps it in a lavatory, which is where Molly, after much nonsense, is accused of being a drug mule. She is locked in a jail cell with a mouldy mattress on the floor and one thin blanket. It's that kind of sneering, overblown nastiness that takes all the fun out of the story.

The bad news is that Molly en Wors is by no means the worst the film we have seen and will still have to see. As movie reviewers, we had to sit through Babelaas!, Bakgat 3 and Poena is Koning, which really scrape the bottom of the barrel.

However, there's a big audience for these films. Audiences love them and they make big money, which allows them to get government money for copy-cat sequels, while filmmakers who aspire to deliver quality fail to get subsidies because the donors believe the film will fail.

It has been that way for decades and it looks as if it will stay that way. Just scoot around the internet and check out the film Hond se Dinges and then you can wonder by which measure the Department of Arts and Culture, headed by Mashatile, decided this would be good for the film industry in South Africa.