When first I saw there was a movie coming up called Platteland, starring Steve Hofmeyr, I made a mental note: Miss it. One disdains Hofmeyr not so much for his other sins as for his total onslaught on the Kris Kristofferson songbook.
Then I saw the poster, in which Hofmeyr looks mean and has a gun, and it felt like it might be a kind of western (which it is, at least plot-wise), so I thought I’d check it out and see how much I could bear (one hour).
Hofmeyr indeed plays the baddie, and very well he does it too. The combination of sinister charm and brute force employed by his character Platteland is perfect, as are the three-piece suit and the highlights in his ageing hair. Hofmeyr’s Mike Ferreira is like the cattle baron of old westerns who’s driving the nice ordinary people off their land; in this case Mike is buying up farms for dark purposes, which means not farming.
In classic Afrikaner ideology, here reproduced in plastic, the ancestral farm and holding on to it is terribly important. It’s a spin-off of the Afrikaner belief in some mystic connection to the land. JM Coetzee comments on this in relation to Breyten Breytenbach, “whose emotional make-up includes feelings of passionate intimacy with the South African landscape that, Afrikaners like to think, can only be expressed in Afrikaans, and therefore (here comes the sinister twist in the reasoning) can only be experienced by the Afrikaner.
Ownership of the land
Closeness of fit between land and language is — so the reasoning goes — proof of the Afrikaner’s natural ownership of the land.”
What we might call the “farm function” of Afrikanerism is articulated in Platteland by Riana (Lianie May), the heroine who stands alone against Hofmeyr’s evil, rapacious Mike. It’s in her blood, her soul is nourished by the soil, et cetera … Oh, and she sings something along those lines too. Did I mention this was a musical?
It starts, in fact, with a remarkable sequence in which, pop-video-style, Riana is seen in different outfits apparently simultaneously, though her Beyoncé hairdo remains pretty consistent throughout. In one stream she’s got a farmy sort of outfit on and is feeding a lamb with a baby’s bottle, out in a picturesque pasture — cut back and forth to Riana atop a Free State cliff in a billowing white negligee or quasi-wedding-dress singing her little heart out.
As it happens, Riana is wearing the billowy white dress because she’s on her way to see her bank manager about extending her credit because the farm is failing. Naturally this is what one wears to see one’s bank manager, and it is not Riana’s fault that the visit to the bank turns, within minutes, into a hostage crisis.
But, to go back a bit, that opening number is about how alone Riana feels and how sore her heart is because she’s alone, her parents having died in mysterious circumstances (well, that’s explained later), and she hasn’t got a man in her life except her feckless brother, who’s into music and snogging a Barbie Doll at school, who happens to be Mike Ferreira’s daughter.
Choice moments
Thus are introduced two themes to add to the farm-takeover business. One is Riana’s love story, her personal hygroman, in which two men will play tug-of-war with her affections: smoothie Ivan Zimmermann and roughie Bok van Blerk. The other is a Romeo and Juliet subplot just to complicate matters a bit and to give a role to singer Vaughan Gardiner, who sings well.
And so Platteland gallops and yodels along, interspersing melodrama and gesang. The songs tend to be versions of a kind of 1980s “power pop”, as far as I can tell, and they are generally not very attractive. There are, however, some choice moments in the lyrics, and I quote two couplets that happened to stick in my mind.
One is a touching romantic moment: “Ek lees jou SMS / en ek vergeet die res”. The other is a fairly interesting strip-club scene (the baddies go there), in which Mike’s roughneck son Jakes (Jay de Villiers) gives a stripper the come-on: “Mel-a-nie / kom ons maak ‘n simfonie”.
An hour of this was enough for me, enjoyable though aspects of Platteland were. I thought Hofmeyr a good actor and a bad singer, Van Blerk a bad actor and a goodish singer. I might have preferred it without the songs, as a straight melodrama as it were, but even so you couldn’t take it seriously for a second. It’s fascinating, though, to see hoary Afrikaner mythology turned so efficiently and lovingly into overheated kitsch.
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