Cry, the Beloved Country is beautiful to the point of kitsch — but it doesn’t seem to have benefited from 50 years’ hindsight, writes JUSTIN PEARCE
Our own dear Y-fronted South African flag appears at the bottom of the ethno-abstract poster for Cry, the Beloved Country. This may seem odd considering that the film is set nearly 50 years before that flag was hoisted over the Union Buildings, but the message is clear enough: this is a film about the new South Africa. Or at least, this is a film that points forward to the new South Africa.
While it is unfair to confuse the product with marketing hype, it is no coincidence that this film version of Cry, the Beloved Country should appear so soon after Uhuru. And the challenge to its makers was to present Alan Paton’s novel, published in 1948, in a way that would resonate in South Africa 1995. The fact that Paton’s novel has approached the status of a national biography made the task faced by the makers of this film all the more momentous — especially since the novel appeared at a time when political and social dynamics were an ocean away from those faced by contemporary South Africa.
In 1948, when the spadework for apartheid had been done but the full horror had yet to be experienced, the prophetic optimism of Paton’s novel probably seemed quaintly naive. In, say, the 1970s, it must have appeared postively deluded. Now, some 18 months into democracy, the film does its best to convince us that Paton got it right, taking the love-will-conquer-all message and rubbing it in our faces. It does so most blatantly at the end of the film: Stephen Khumalo stares into the Drakensberg sunrise while his son dangles from the gallows — fade to black, and we are told that “Nelson Mandela’s New South Africa” has abolished the dealth penalty as a violation of human rights.
Darrell Roodt’s Cry, the Beloved Country is beautiful to the point of kitsch, boasts some fine performances (even if James Earl Jones as a rural Zulu priest is stretching the suspension of disbelief a little too far), and digests a rambling narrative by means of snappy pacing.
Yet rather than use the hindsight of half a century to iron out the sillier excesses of the book, the film only exaggerates them. Paton’s implication that a return to prelapsarian rural innocence was a fitting solution to his characters’ woes is even less plausible now than it was in 1948 — and yet the rural idyll of Paton’s text survives intact, the film opening with a voice-over of the first lines of the novel just in case the audience missed the point. In fact, it is beautified even further: the drought which follows Paton’s immortal “lovely road” passage receives scant mention in the screenplay. Redemption lies in taking to the hills to meditate while your son is hanged, or in rescuing his young wife from the corruption of the city to the safety of the village where, if the blacks behave themselves, the benevolent mlungu will build them a new church.
The city, by contrast, remains as deep a pit of vice in the film as it is in the book. Such moral extremes run throughout the film as they do for the book, and are irritating in an era when even Hollywood is wavering in its belief in absolute rights and wrongs. (The only character who embodies any shades of grey is the white landowner James Jarvis, but his change of heart is unconvincingly scripted.) A bad city-dweller cheats Khumalo out of his money, and then along comes a good city- dweller who helps the bewildered old man find his way. A nurse who provides a crucial clue in Khumalo’s search for his missing son is filmed with her headgear glowing like a halo. In terms of Christian iconography, she forms a neat contrast with the Babylonian whore of a shebeen owner. Khumalo himself, the implied saint, is shadowed by his sneering political activist brother John, who is even more of a caricature in the film than he was in the book.
The trashing of John Khumalo is probably the single aspect of the novel which sits most uncomfortably with the hindsight gained in the wake of liberation. Like it or not, it was the John Khumalos of the world who made the new South Africa happen, far more so than the Stephen Khumalos or the James Jarvises. If Paton can be forgiven for making this mistake, the error is less easy to ignore in the film which refuses to benefit from that hindsight.
Paton acknowleged the anger that was growing against the regime in the 1940s, but, apparently unable to put it in the mouths of his protagonists, found it necessary to let his own narrative voice intrude on the action — “there is anger in the land”. The film cops out by echoing his words once again in a completely gratuitous voice-over.
Novel and film might imply that change was imminent, but in terms of what we actually read and see, the best South Africa could hope for in 1948 was not change, but comfort — random acts of kindness in the face of an increasingly brutal situation. Take, for example, Khumalo’s son who writes to his parents from prison, saying Death Row is not such a bad place because “the white men do not speak badly to me here”.
Roodt’s knack of finding beauty in the most unlikely places meshes well with Paton’s optimism despite events. Notice how the camera plays with the torrents of water coming through the holes in the church roof, how it escapes the Johannesburg squalor to dwell on the beauty of individual faces.
Add to this the characters who appear to be drawn not so much from South Africa as from such lofty sources as ancient fairytales, Jungian psychology, and biblical prophecy, and you’ve got the heartstring-tugging, feel-good movie of the decade. The film is as watchable as the novel is readable, regardless of the credibility problems of both. Ignore Cry, the Beloved Country’s claims to be engaging with the realities of South Africa 1995, and take tissues.