With A Boy Called Twist, writer and director Tim Greene takes an obstinately “parochial” approach and re-imagines Charles Dickens’s novel, Oliver Twist, with idiosyncratic ingenuity.
Dickens’s novel was concerned with poverty in England, and Greene’s version, while largely retaining the plot of this classic, takes on broad, universal issues such as child abuse, love and the search for freedom.
Twist (Jarrid Geduld), arbitrarily named in an orphanage after Dickens’s protagonist, is abandoned when his mother dies soon after his birth. From then on, he endures the horrors of child labour in the Swartland — first as a field hand and then as the assistant to an undertaker — before escaping to the Mother City. Despite his obvious resilience, Twist struggles to fit in with a gang of street urchins presided over by the dreadlocked gang leader named Fagin, until a man he attempts to rob offers him a new lease on life.
The cinematography charting his journey and fighting spirit is perhaps this film’s trump card; it is moody and evocative. Visually, there is a constant juxtaposition of the romance that is the plot and the stylised brutishness of Twist’s immediate circumstances. Greene goes to great lengths to craft a visual articulation of Twist’s lot in life, and thereby compensates for his economy with words.
The flurry of scenes that mark the film’s beginning, for instance, are weather-beaten and decidedly nightmarish. When Twist finally escapes the clutches of the unscrupulous undertaker, his disorientation as he arrives in Cape Town is communicated to us via shimmering nightlights and soft focus.
Greene, who says the film was inspired by the injustices suffered by homeless children in Cape Town, does his best to avoid moral grandstanding and even injects the film with some comic goofiness (though the success of this element is minimal).
Greene’s technique of getting “extraordinary people to play ordinary roles”, in the attempt to accentuate nuance and detail, leads to the opposite effect in the case of Leslie Fong (Fagin) and Kim Engelbrecht (Nancy), for example. Their superfluous, cartoonish antics are grating and chew away at some of the profundity of the story. In a way, they are indicative of the film’s sometimes distracting ambivalence.
There are moments when A Boy Called Twist aims for a gritty edge, which is carried well by the likes of Tertius Swanepoel as the streetwise Dodger, and by Bart Fouche as the icy Bill Sykes. Later, the film shoots straight for the opposite end of the spectrum in the absurd final moments. Still, given Twist’s charming steadfastness, you are forced to vouch for him from the beginning — implausible fortune or not.
Overall, A Boy Called Twist is a riveting, emotional ride, spurred on by an invigorating soundtrack and a beguiling minimalism.