Bertold Bohmer (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is a widowed, sixtysomething German émigré and athletics trainer. He lives like a pig in a cottage on an Afrikaans couple’s farm, has no interest in women – black or otherwise – and never shaves. This is possible, but highly implausible.
When he loses his job and the “boys” he trains he is depressed. Then he spots a black girl Christine (Nthati Moshesh) with a special talent and starts training her in the disciplinarian way of his type, who would be very neat and/or kinky.
He is neither and puts her up in his house because of her talent and the fact that she’s an illegal immigrant from Namibia. She has no surname to hint at any kind of ethnic origin, however, and soon tires of his dogmatism and leaves. Days later the Boer chooses to confront him about his absent black tenant without the slightest trace of irony by the film-maker.
Scripted by Johann Potgieter, The Long Run is as determinedly asexual as an SATV production circa 1986. Director Jean Stewart may have lived here until she was 10 and won all kinds of fancy prizes overseas, but she doesn’t seem to have the faintest grasp of drama or interest in local textures whatsoever.
Moshesh and the rest of our excellent local actors, such as Seputla Sebogodi and Anna-Mart van der Merwe, have to struggle along with a kind of mid-Atlantic English that makes this film almost as interesting as watching passing fence posts.