The Twitter feed for the American rap group
Weird: for various reasons, including a swift banning and then unbanning, two movies open this week that might be said to represent something of the internal struggle taking place in the South African film industry. The one is Of Good Report, the famously banned-unbanned movie that has caused a huge censorship fracas over the past few weeks, and is now taking advantage of its unbanning two weekends ago to get out there while people are talking about it. The other movie, which unlike Of Good Report has actually been scheduled for release on this date for a while, is Vehicle 19.
Vehicle 19, alert readers will recall, was a key exemplar in the discussion about the South African movie industry written by filmmaker Roger Young and published in these pages. He eloquently described the process, endorsed by the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), a government body, that has made it harder – instead of easier – for interesting, independently minded movies to get made in South Africa.
The NFVF controls a lot of funding for movies, as is its mandate, so filmmakers submit to its strictures on the kinds of movies they should be making. They attend script workshops that are surely intended to help beginners to get started properly but that end up limiting filmmakers' options because the kind of scriptwriting taught here is classic mainstream American down-the-line three-act dramas with join-the-dots character development and plots with their "inciting incidents" and mid-point turning points all in place.
The belief, it would appear, is that replicating the clichés and conventions of American movie structures will make South African movies more marketable here and abroad. That may be so, but global success hasn't happened to any of the movies produced through this NFVF-backed system, or at least not yet. Perhaps lightning will strike. Or perhaps moviegoers overseas would like to see a South African movie that isn't a copy of American movies?
Either way, this week's releases offer some opportunities for comparison, because the NFVF refused to fund Of Good Report, apparently put off by its dark subject matter, whereas Vehicle 19 comes out of its production system. The former is a highly original drama about a very controversial subject (teacher-pupil sex), which seems to have been dragged directly from the depths of South Africa's tortured soul, whereas the latter is a pretty standard thriller that happens to be set in South Africa but could, in fact, with very minor adjustments, be set anywhere in the world.
The most original thing about Vehicle 19 is that it imposes on itself an extreme unity of location: it's all set in the car. We stay, or the camera stays, inside the car (or apparently so: there must have been a few shots from the bonnet); anything we see outside the car is through its windows. This means, first of all, that the movie has that jelly-tripod wobblycam feel, garnished with a few vérité flares and the like, so anyone given to carsickness is advised to stay away. Second, the vehicular restriction means we see a lot of lead actor Paul Walker's left ear, and his left elbow gives a creditable if somewhat wooden performance.
Such a restriction, placed on a movie by a filmmaker, can be a useful and generative challenge. Alfred Hitchcock set Lifeboat on a lifeboat, carrying 10 or 12 people, and managed to make a murder mystery out of it. And, interestingly, Of Good Report also imposes a kind of formal challenge on itself: its protagonist, the predatory schoolteacher, is never heard to speak in the movie. This makes for a possible over-reliance on facial manoeuvres, but it definitely also increases the tension as the viewer wonders what's going on in this possibly demented man's head.
Tension in Vehicle 19 is increased mechanically, by repetition. Take the calls to the protagonist's girlfriend at the start. We get one very early on (yes, I'm coming, just wait, 20 minutes, and so on), and we know he won't make his deadline, though it's clearly very important – love and trust are mentioned. But the protagonist will, indeed, miss his girlfriend-agreed deadline, so to ratchet up the tension we have another call to the girlfriend: Yes, I'm on my way, a bit delayed, lost, give me another chance darling … And, then, 10 minutes later, another call to the girlfriend.
For me, this became a dull script. It checks all the boxes, all too efficiently. We see some paperwork relating to a prison discharge in the foreground of a shot, and minutes later we find out, through dialogue, that the protagonist is indeed just out of prison. We see a newspaper poster saying a prosecutor has been kidnapped and, like clockwork, a kidnapped prosecutor falls out of the trunk of vehicle 19.
This is the basic plot concept that powers the movie: the unknowing innocent (or is he really so innocent? – cue spooky music) caught up in events he doesn't understand. It's the plot of North by Northwest, to mention another Hitchcock, or the first half of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear. In this case, we have an unknowing American caught up in a South African drama of corruption and murder. At least he has some excellent driving skills, probably learned on the six Fast and Furious movies with which Walker has thus far frittered away his career.
Walker is not an especially bad actor, but working from within the confines of a car must be even harder than emoting to a green screen, and he's not really up to it. But then this is hardly a character, as such, so much as a collection of traits expected of the protagonist of a thriller, and he is not given anything original to say.
Nor is the aforementioned prosecutor, but at least she is a feisty presence, goggle-eyes and all. She even gets to take some potshots, while hanging out of the car's sliding door, at the bad guys who, by this point, are chasing her and Paul through some urban wasteland. Such female feist, if that's the word, is welcome in this very male movie, even if it is very brief. Nomcobo Jiba, eat your heart out.