Whither Afrikaans cinema? Or should that be, as in the old journalistic joke, wither Afrikaans cinema?
So far, in recent memory, we’ve had two attempts at a post-Paljas Afrikaans cinema. One, I suppose, we must call an ‘art movie” — Ouma se Slim Kind. At the other end of the spectrum there was the poep comedy Poena Is Koning. The latter, by the way, made an awful lot of money (proportionately speaking) and we gather there is a sequel on the way. I speculate that it will have female leads and, in the crass style of its predecessor, be titled Poeslappies.
Now we have Bakgat!, which falls somewhere in between the models proposed by Ouma se Slim Kind and Poena Is Koning. It is an efficient attempt to replicate the American teen comedy, with a healthy dose of sports and a sweet custardy filling of romance.
The story goes as follows. In the savage pecking order of teenagedom Katrien Swanepoel (Cherié van der Merwe) is this high school’s Miss Popularity, the ‘hottest girl in school”, and she’s having a romance with the top rugby player, Werner ‘Killer” Botha (Altus Theart). When Werner humiliates her by giving her a public brush-off, Katrien puts a long-term plan in place: she will take the school’s biggest wimp, as spelled out by his name, Wimpie Koekemoer (Ivan Botha), and turn him into a star rugby player to rival Werner. Thus she hopes to force Werner off the field and back into her arms.
What happens from that point on is largely predictable, as it must be if the model of the American teen comedy is to be followed slavishly, which it is. It has been heavily signalled to us that Werner is a bit of a doos, anyway, and Wimpie, despite his ungainly gait and all that blinking from behind his spectacles, is in fact not such a wimp. We simply have to wait for those spectacles to come off and disappear (no mention of contact lenses or the like) to know that Wimpie has achieved a new level of manhood and to understand that now Katrien may be seeing him as more than just a vehicle for her romantic machinations.
Alongside that there is some slightly broader comedy with two duos of attendant sub-characters: Katrien’s two airhead girlfriends, and, in parallel to them, two guys who seem closer to the kind of pupils who go to the same school as Poena. These two guys amusingly provide what one might call the skottelgoed humour. (There’s a mincing moffie thrown in for laughs, too, but he’s such an obvious stereotype that I, for one, was unable to laugh. No twist offering any respite from this casually homophobic stereotyping is offered.)
Writer-director Henk Pretorius has said that ‘With this movie I wanted to bring across a universal theme in Afrikaans” — and then says, a few sentences later in the same press release, ‘We basically wanted to make a Hollywood-type movie in Afrikaans.” He seems unaware that he is contradicting himself. Only if we unthinkingly accept total cultural saturation by American-style cinema do ‘universal” and ‘Hollywood” mean the same thing.
This tension is at the heart of Bakgat!. It wants to be ‘universal” and thus commercial, obviously; someone has to make commercially viable South African movies beyond the Oh Schucks I’m Poena model. It wants to press the buttons of moviegoers conditioned by the American product, but it wants some cultural specificity too. Bakgat! is better at the former than the latter. It is, indeed, and skilfully so, an American teen movie in Afrikaans.
But what, then, does it mean to be Afrikaans in the empire of the imaginary that we call Hollywood? The way Bakgat! solves this problem is noteworthy. Obviously, the characters speak Afrikaans and their school would appear to be in some enclave in Pretoria; their ‘culture” as Afrikaners, however, seems entirely limited to rugby. This sport provides what cultural values seem present in the film, if any. Hoary old Ian Roberts is present as a sort of ancestral memory of an older kind of Afrikanerdom, something rough-voiced and farmy. He gives Wimpie advice on rugby and delivers the odd adage in which rugby, girls, winning and losing are lined up into the ‘moral of the story”. We know it’s the moral of the story because this homily is pointedly repeated at a vital moment, in the form approved by all those Hollywood scriptwriting guides.
For the rest, this is a sanitised, deracinated kind of Afrikanerdom — a Dainfern of the mind. It’s suburban, pastel-hued, bleached of any real cultural specificity. (At least Ouma se Slim Kind tried to grapple with this, how ever disastrously it failed.) This Afrikaans Hollywood-Dainfern is also thoroughly white. After the screening I attended, a few of my fellow critics and I tried to work out how many black people we’d seen so fleetingly in the movie. Two? Perhaps, just perhaps, as many as three?
As for being ‘universal”, I doubt it. Again, at the screening I attended, two young black reviewers simply got up and left after 15 minutes. Obviously the moral fables provided by rugby weren’t enough to hold their interest. (And, coincidentally, on the day I started writing this review I saw Afrikaans newspaper posters about a boy who nearly got his head ripped off in a rugby match. Bakgat! contains nothing of this sort of danger. Rugby’s just a step on the way to manhood and romance.)
Perhaps Bakgat! will reach its desired ‘demographic” and make some money. It will be relying heavily on that particular demographic, because it’s unlikely to cross any of the boundaries that still balkanise our society. Maybe there’s a really ‘universal” movie to be made in South Africa, even in Afrikaans; maybe not. But if there’s a real South African movie to be made, ‘universal” or not, it will probably be less of a straightforward and unimaginative transliteration of Hollywood conventions and pastel-coloured values.