/ 1 October 2010

Long street to freedom

Long Street To Freedom

Revel Fox deals with seemingly very personal material in Long Street. The press release, at least, tells us so, and the impression is surely reinforced by the fact that Fox has cast his wife and daughter in the key roles of this mother-daughter drama.

Sannie Fox plays Sia, a musician whom we first meet at the moment she’s checked herself out of rehab. Her mother, Maria, played by Roberta Fox, fetches Sia from what seems a rather desolate demesne and takes her back to her place to stay while she’s getting herself (I want to say “her shit”) together. You have only to wait a shortish while for the predictable talking-to: This is my house, you live by my rules, and so on.

And so Sia tries to do. Much of the film has Sia wandering moodily around Cape Town, presumably fighting the inner fight — to take some of that lovely heroin, or not? There’s a dealer, a boyfriend who half-seduces her back to the drug, and some bandmates who are understandably cautious about playing with her again.

Meanwhile, mom Maria does a lot of worrying, it seems, while also trying to get busy with some singing herself. In the course of that endeavour she meets Andiswa, played by the late Busi Mhlongo, as well as a charming but brusque music producer who may offer romance. This despite the intermittent presence of Sia’s dad (David Butler), a writer who is also rather down in the mouth, though he elicits a spark of interest from a funky barista.

The narrative of Long Street has something of the wandering quality of Sia’s excursions, and that’s its mode: it’s going as understated realism, the textures of ordinary life preferred over the potential hysterics of the drug theme.

It’s also a good solution when you’re on a very low budget. Certainly, I think the choice of a quiet tone and a reduced palette is a good one, and it does make the story feel real, but whether that’s an end in itself is open to question.

Do we get any particular insight into these people? Are they exemplary or at least emblematic in some way? I’m not sure.

If these people are emblematic, it’s not clear what they are emblems of. Troubled artistic personalities? Fucked-up white bourgeois South Africans?

For myself, I found Sia and Maria less and less interesting as the movie went on. If Long Street is a character study, one should probably feel a movement towards the greater revelation of these characters, which doesn’t really occur.

There is a touching scene or two between mother and daughter, especially later in the film, and here the underplayed quality comes into its own. But, overall, the danger is that the film will simply leave the viewer feeling like an uninvolved spectator at the rather inward ravelling of private matters.

Perhaps it’s that the Foxes, mother and daughter, aren’t really acting here. Playing it quiet is one thing, but there is some lack of projection, some unwillingness to engage with the audience — to meet its eye, as it were.

One understands the aesthetic reasons for not going over the top, but I suspect that it actually takes very honed acting talent to develop roles as internalised as these and, at the same time, to enable the viewer to work out what’s going on for the character.

It has something to do with how the face registers emotion, and there is certainly some mystery in how certain actors are able to do it, apparently intuitively, and others cannot or will not.

Both the lead actors here too often look merely peevish when I imagine they should be projecting a stronger feeling than that.

Mhlongo is a strong, mysterious presence, but she remains largely mysterious. Mostly, she’s presented as a rather exotic figure with an echo of Mother Africa, possessor of some kind of ancient, earthy shamanic wisdom.

Yet it is telling that her Andiswa is most effective when she comes down to earth: a key scene with Maria at the kitchen table attains a kind of lightly worn dignity and easy calm.

Butler, as the unhappy writer-dad Wesley, is rather relegated to subplot level. His storyline acts as a counterpoint to the mother-daughter narrative, but he also feels unnecessary.

He is not left with much more than a fairly clichéd portrayal of a tormented writer and failed dad. There isn’t enough detail, really, in the way he is shown, to elicit the viewer’s sympathy. Like Mhlongo, there are times he feels like an add-on.

Long Street is an interesting and commendable experiment, if experiment it is: an attempt to (re)tell a highly personal family story, one obviously freighted with deep emotion, but in a way that does not shove the emotion (or very little of it) in one’s face.

Thank heavens for that — we don’t need more screaming and shouting. Or even close-ups of the needle going in. This is no My Black Little Heart; it hasn’t the air of flamboyant self-destruction, or even the same degree of performative narcissism.

But we do need more from the characters than they give us. Perhaps this is an example of the weird over-involvement that sometimes happens when a filmmaker is dealing with material very close to his or her heart. It’s as though some powerful inner vision excludes a communicable outer vision.

Maybe it’s that Revel Fox, so accustomed to these faces, presumes that we can see in their inflections as much as he can, or (to put it another way) is so fascinated by these actors and these characters that he neglects to inform the audience why we should be too.