Directors chat: Oliver Hermanus
Oliver Hermanus's film explores lust and envy, writes Tymon Smith
Inspired by an advert Oliver Hermanus saw in a Cape Town newspaper looking for white, married Afrikaner men to participate in a twice-weekly all-male orgy, Skoonheid wasn't the director's first choice of project to follow up his acclaimed debut, Shirley Adams .
"I was working on something else - The Struggle - which became a kind of pathway to this film because the more I wrote it, the longer it got, and it had a disease of the heart in that it never had a centre point and I just kept writing around that.
"The process of writing Skoonheid, in comparison, was much faster, and I was clearer about what I wanted to say," the 27-year-old Cape Town director tells me when I meet him at the Durban Film Festival.
Shot in Bloemfontein and Cape Town and starring Deon Lotz as Francois, a repressed Afrikaner obsessed with a young object of desire played by Charlie Keegan, Skoonheid left its first Durban audience with a sense of awe and envy at its clear, intelligent and mature examination of the poisonous nature of beauty and the lengths to which it can drive people.
Yes, you may hear about its orgy scene in which a group of Afrikaner men indulge their homosexual fantasies in a dark farmhouse room, but this is a film with universal application for anyone who has ever wanted someone they couldn't have.
Hermanus says: "It's a cautionary tale for me because I posed the question to myself: What happens when you're very comfortable and happy and you're at a party or some social occasion and you encounter someone who epitomises everything you have constructed in your mind as the perfect other person for you?
"I was very influenced by this idea of elective affinity, where there's this universal concept where we may encounter someone in the world who is the most perfect match for us and you may spend your whole life never encountering that person, but there's a great chance that you can.
"Then the question is: What happens when that happens, because you're married or you're repressed or she is a Palestinian and you're an Israeli?
"That's how I approached Francois - it's that poisonous experience he's going through.
"He's traumatised by the fact that he can't get over this person because this is who he wishes he could spend the rest of his life with, and also who he wishes he was.
"It's very conflicted - envy versus obsession versus lust."
When I ask if he's worried the Cannes award might pigeonhole the film and scare off more traditional audiences, the director says: "It is always a concern that may happen and that it may become a film about x or y.
"It's good the film won the Queer Palm because we were very concerned about making sure people identified with the film as not being homophobic.
"The characters are negative gay characters and usually the award goes to the gayest character in the room. I was very honoured they appreciated Skoonheid in that sense.
"It doesn't affect the fact that here, in South Africa, it is more than that and has more legs to stand on, and in Europe it was pre-sold before the award, so people did judge it on merit."
- Winner of the Best South African Feature, a Special Jury Mention at this year's Durban International Film Festival and the Queer Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year, 'Skoonheid' opens in cinemas today