BAFANA KHUMALO travelled to the Karoo to visit the set of the film Paljas, a collaboration between Katinka Heyns and Anant Singh
MANY a traveller, in the relative comfort of his train compartment, has rattled past this dusty cell and thanked his god that it was not his home. The house on the side of the railway tracks, with its red corrugated iron roof, somehow instantly betrays its ownership by the state railway company.
The occupant, a fairly senior employee, would have been rewarded by his employers with unfettered access to railway material – like the cast off railway sleepers that will find a use as makeshift fence pillars. This house in the middle of rural nowhere will have a garden of sorts which may well serve as testament to man’s need to beautify his surroundings. This is white, small-town civil service South Africa, a kind of lost Afrikaner Siberia.
>From one such homestead, music from a bygone European era wafts through a window, contemptuously out of place among the doringbome and is swallowed by the surrounding mountains. “One day, when we were young, you held me and you told me … ” a greying moustached man in a military uniform bellows with aplomb, oblivious of his cruelly distorted musical abilities. He is surrounded by his family and this is a particularly special moment.
Special because a dysfunctional family – a son who has not spoken for four years; a daughter who is quite incapable of communicating outside her world of teenage pain; and, a wife whose soul is being slowly strangled by having to share this less than illustrious fortune – has finally begun to heal.
Amid this curiously merry band stands a strange man with a reddish fringe, arm in a sling. Smiles are exchanged, gentle glances flirt caressingly from eye to eye, a hand slowly reaches over a shoulder to offer comradeship. It’s a truly uplifting portrait for it says there is hope, even in Afrikaner Siberia. But the hope is suddenly interrupted by a voice that intones, “Cut! … I like what you’re doing, but I think you shouldn’t raise that bottle yet, let’s not give away what you are going to do yet. Verstaan jy sommer … ? (Do you understand?)”
This Afrikaner nightmare is actually a dream: a celluloid dream whose production wound to a close last week in the Klein Karoo of the Northern Cape. And the voice expressing gentle approval and measured instruction is that of director Katinka Heyns, whose responsibility it is to weave this dream into a celluloid reality called Paljas.
It’s a dream that has united two people who probably would not have heard about each other ten years ago, although they lived and worked in the same country: the doyenne of Afrikaner film-making, Katinka Heyns, and the new black prince of movie moguls, producer Anant Singh. Not only has he sunk a considerable sum of money into the project; he has committed himself to it being South Africa’s official entry at next year’s Cannes Film festival.
“I think that this is a soulful movie,” Heyns had said to me the previous night as the cast rehearsed a scene in the background. Marius Weyers, Liezel van der Merwe, Larry Leyden and Ellis Pearson had gathered around a piano, musical director Sue Greally taking them through their paces.
The story-line of Paljas is also somewhat out of the ordinary. It’s about a family who, because of the changing fortunes of the father, Hendrik, find themselves dispatched to manage a desolate Karoo railway station. Here the family finds itself slowly falling apart. This, however, changes when a circus comes to town. The clown, Manuel, remains behind and a secret friendship forms between him and little Willem. It’s a friendship that manages to start healing the mute boy, who eventually regains his speech. But this friendship is not without its downside; the small-minded townsfolk think that little Willem is possessed by the devil because he has started drawing clown faces and performing magic tricks. But when Hendrik discovers the clown with his son, the friendship develops further, until it has drawn the whole family in.
While many a listener might sigh with a sense of satisfaction upon hearing this story, financial backers were not that quick to bite. They felt that the tale would not be particularly feasible to sell to an audience. This was, after all, no Mandela flick with car chases. One of the few people to see the potential in the story was producer Anant Singh – he who brought us Sarafina and Cry the Beloved Country.
Still, even in our reconciliation-addicted country, the Heyns and Singh partnership has to be one of the strangest around. How does Heyns find working with Singh? “I think we were equally wary of each other at first, but we soon realised that we share a passion for movies, which for me is all that matters.”
Although Singh didn’t demand a multiple car pile-up, he did suggest that it be made in English and the female lead be portrayed by “an international star”. Meryl Streep is one name that was apparently thrown into the discussion. “I really could not see Meryl Streep or Glen Close as Katrina, it just wouldn’t have read,” says Heyns, adding that even if they had fitted the bill she would have found directing them daunting.
Singh sent her to New York to try and find the stars, but she came back empty-handed. “I said that it’s got to be an indigenous cast and if we don’t do it, who is going to do it?” Heyns directs this question half to herself and half to no one in particular. As a compromise, she suggested two versions of the movie, one in Afrikaans and another in English, could be shot. If he wasn’t already won over by the artistic idea behind the movie, this suggestion clinched the deal and Singh gave the go-ahead.
The male lead is Marius Weyers who, after commuting between the United States and South Africa for the past nine years, sees the role of Hendrik as one of his most challenging. “I’ve never had a character as complex as this one,” says Weyers, “he moves from floundering around like a lion trying to slap people into line … doing it too big, too hard – and then the very next day you see him trying to bring life to a party. He is a lost soul … there are times when you feel very sorry for him.”
In Weyers one can sense a certain amount of pride about being in a movie with an all- South African cast. “While I understand that one might need to have an international lead for commercial value, I don’t understand why they would have to bring in five American actors like they did for Cry.”
The last word belongs to the female lead, Aletta Bezuidenhout. “Oh, I heard the rumours that they were thinking of Meryl Streep. I don’t think she would have pulled it off,” she says as she is grabbed by a minder to prepare for the next scene. She gets up and walks away and, as if to prevent what she said from being misconstrued, comes back to me to add: “Let me ask you something; would you cast Meryl Streep in a movie about, say, Winnie Mandela?” The answer has to be “no”. She turns around, walks away again, then stops. “See? That `s why I don’t think they would have fitted … I am particular to this environment and this experience. They are not.”