Shaun de Waal Art movie of the week
South African writer Damon Galgut’s novel, on which Belgian director Marion Hnsel’s film The Quarry is based, is a spare, hauntingly oblique work. The main character is known simply as ”the man”: as the film begins, he is on the run, but why, and from what, we are never told.
The whole thing has the air of a slightly surreal fable, which is one thing to do in words and another altogether in film. A text allows – requires, even – the investment of the reader’s imagination; films are made of photographs of real, pre- existing things and people. Movies are necessarily specific – unless they’re prepared to subvert reality in a way most movie-goers don’t exactly relish (remember Jean-Luc Godard? No, I didn’t think so).
Hnsel’s film sticks closely to the novel, though she simplifies the ending, which works. Still, there isn’t enough going on at any given moment in the movie to engross the viewer. The slender plot (it all seems generated by the dual meaning of ”quarry”) is stretched over two hours, and the blank mysteriousness of the characters doesn’t spur emotional involvement with them.
The Quarry is very much a European art movie in Africa – static, portentous, with the wide screen making the most of the stark landscape of the west Cape coast. Even if you’re prepared to forego narrative momentum, though, you will find it hard to get over some of the accents. The South African actors do well, as one might hope, but ”the man” is played by John Lynch, who seems to be Irish, and the Baptist minister whose role he appropriates is apparently German.
Worst of all, though, is Jonny Philips as the manipulative Captain Mong. This Flemish actor has the most risible Afrikaans accent I have ever heard on film or anywhere else – and that’s when he’s speaking Afrikaans, too. In a movie where everything depends on texture and nuance, such lapses are fatal.