This week I sneaked, almost (but not quite) unnoticed, into a midday matinee of Leon Schuster’s latest offering, Mr Bones.
Like most people who think themselves too sophisticated for the kind of movies Schuster churns out, I didn’t really want anyone to see me doing it.
But unfortunately there are legions of people who know me without me knowing them, simply because, some years ago (in what sometimes seems like another life) I actually appeared in a Schuster movie. It turned me into a local star overnight.
So, having run the usual gauntlet of unsolicited admirers addressing me loudly by my Schuster-invented screen name of “Zulu” as I hurried through the foyer of the multiplex, I settled into a seat in the otherwise empty cinema and waited for the lights to go down.
I braced myself for the worst. And sure enough, Schuster was happy to oblige.
But was I being subjected to the unreconstructed romp of racism, animal abuse and puerile coprophilia that the critics had howled about? The real trouble was that there was so much to wade through that the mind struggled to find a simple series of accusations that could properly be laid at Schuster’s door.
Let’s talk about structure first. OK, let’s face it, Schuster doesn’t do structure.
The trouble with Schuster’s movies is that you can tell when he has changed his mind halfway through a plot that has been germinating in his brain. Where most writers would scrunch up the page into an angry ball and start again, our Leon simply carries on with the new theme as if nothing had happened, leaving puzzled bits of unresolved plot trailing in his wake.
Characters appear, peter out for no reason, and then suddenly barge their way back into the story, without any sense of respect for the other characters. All of this chaos is then unleashed unrepentantly across the silver screen.
Coprophilia you certainly get in buckets — dung falling from the sky, people falling into piles of dung, hapless characters getting their heads stuck inside the backsides of elephant and rhino. The animals certainly do get abused — but then so do the people.
Which brings us to the question of racism.
I have to confess that for three-quarters of the film, I was consciously trying to decide whether these awful antics were racist or not. Every time the racism bubble popped up in my head, I found myself reminding myself that in There’s A Zulu On My Stoep, the one and only Schuster movie I had been involved in, exactly the same gags were played out at the expense of a series of white characters.
The real problem here is not really racism. What the paying public should be up in arms about is repetitiveness — the same jokes, the same storyline, even the same Sun City scenery mercilessly rehashed from one movie to the next.
But there is another interesting angle on the racism accusation. In two of his most successful recent movies, There’s A Zulu On My Stoep and Mr Bones, Schuster casts a black character as the romantic hero. OK, it’s not a local black character, it’s an African American. But is his newfound passion for African American heroes returning to the African bush a purely commercial consideration, a fawning ploy to gain access to the lucrative American market?
If that was all there was to it, why has he not invented white American characters to do the job? Everyone knows that it is harder to sell black stories at the American box office than white ones — especially when you choose to work with black actors who are not already on Hollywood’s repertory list.
But no, Schuster sticks resolutely to his darkies, consciously or unconsciously championing the Garveyite cause of the return of the children of the diaspora to the motherland (even if the motherland of Schuster’s imagination only stretches as far as his favourite bend of the Jukskei river).
If he carries on in this mould, Schuster could soon find himself clasped to the bosom of the Pan Africanist Congress. In fact, given Thami kaPlaatjie’s recently stated intention of bringing Afrikaners into the Africanist fold, Schuster might already be hustling in the vanguard of a new political dispensation.
And what about the humour? Well, I sat through about 90 of the film’s 100 minutes without being able to raise so much as a smile. For some strange reason, Schuster saves his best bits for use as book marks at the beginning and at the end.
The arrival of the white infant (who will later become the sole white inhabitant of Schuster’s fantasy African village, portrayed in adulthood by Schuster himself) is a classic Schuster moment — dropping out of the sky like the Coca-Cola bottle in The God’s Must Be Crazy, and similarly transforming life on the African veld from then on.
At the end of the movie, Schuster engineers the arrival of another white baby — this one the fruit of his own loins, delivered into the world through the more natural process of common or garden procreation — whose mother, remarkably, is a black princess.
There could be a deeply hidden, subliminal plea for acceptance lurking here. The whole scene is orchestrated with such care that one hovers on the edge of being moved.
It is what happens between the arrivals of these two white babies that is difficult to swallow. The reason is less to do with political incorrectness than with cinematic ineptness.
For those with the stamina to sit through it all, the best visual gags start to emerge in the last 20 minutes of the film — too late, I would imagine, to titillate the highly demanding American box office Schuster is so clearly trying to seduce.
But Mr Bones has struck gold in South Africa, which probably says more about South African audiences than about Schuster himself. In the absence of any other viable product, Schuster is as good as South African cinema gets.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza