Not having watched Egoli on TV, I can’t say whether the Egoli movie is better or worse than the soap opera or “daily drama”, as it was once called. I can say, though, that as a movie it is almost unbearably dire. The characterisation is thin, the plot repetitive and clichéd, the cinemato-graphy scarcely above home-video standard.
There is some confusion about the title, too. The press release has simply Egoli. The release-date report calls it Egoli: The Movie. The film’s credits say Egoli: Afrikaners Is Plesierig. I can’t see what’s plesierig about these Afrikaners or hybrid South Africans; they all seem to be having a particularly bad time.
Especially Joe (Darren Kelfkens). He’s perpetually short of cash, and he won’t take money from a woman, meaning in particular his stripper of a girlfriend, though he is in fact employed by a woman, so he’s already taking money from one. His ex-wife wants maintenance for their child, but when he does manage to borrow some money he gambles it away in a desperate attempt to increase it. We knew that wouldn’t work.
The fact that Joe is gambling with Lolly Jackson, playing himself, is rather piquant. Much action takes place in Teazers, as we know from the neon “Welcome to Teazers” sign shown on screen. None of the strippers actually take off their bikini underwear, though. So much for product placement.
Joe’s best friend Niek (David Rees) is losing patience with him, while Niek’s own life gets a little more complicated. Something to do with his wife’s extramural activities and his son and a gun, his various relatives’ marital problems, and a border-war incident revealed in the prologue, which allegedly haunts him and Joe to this day. The press release refers to this as “dark secrets, buried deeper than gold” — and that’s all the gold you get in Egoli.
The rest is soap-opera stuff of a stultifyingly dull nature. It is impossible to care about these cardboard characters and their contrived problems. If you don’t know Niek’s background, you’re likely to find him puzzling and characterless, as I did. I simply can’t see the appeal. Only Casper de Vries seems to have some vibrancy, and he’s a moffie caricature.
If this relates to contemporary South Africa, as it claims, it must be satire — except it’s not funny. There is, though, an unintentionally hilarious moment to do with a shooting incident. The police arrive within seconds of Shaleen Surtie-Richards’s phone call, and they arrive in force, leaping out of their many cars and behaving for all the world like their counterparts in Los Angeles. So many cops, arriving so quickly at the scene of the crime? How I laughed.
Egoli will be released on June 16