I don’t suppose there’s much danger of Charlie Vundla’s film How to Steal Two Million being mistaken for a much-delayed sequel to How to Steal a Million, a charming but very lightweight romcom-caper with Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn, from some time in the mid-1960s. The titular echo does, however, spur the viewer to wonder whether Vundla’s film couldn’t have done with a little lightness and charm.
But then it’s not that kind of movie. It’s a tense heist drama, set in today’s South Africa but very much modelled on the American subgenre of heist movie, with all the relevant tropes to which we have become accustomed: the criminal just out of jail (Menzi Ngubane), desperate to go legit but lured into one last job in which nothing could possibly go wrong but does. This plays itself out in a twisty plot filled with betrayals and other surprises.
As with Retribution, the other new South African movie made in a familiar thriller format, How to Steal Two Million could be transplanted to another place without much loss of content. That’s if we take content to mean the basic storyline, built on a generic armature, and if we see the South Africanness on display here as a kind of local veneer applied on top of that.
Perhaps the detachability of veneer from core content is more obvious in the case of How to Steal Two Million than it is for Retribution because the former’s script does less work to indigenise the story. At plot level, the script of How to Steal Two Million is a well-structured and fast-moving yarn; at the level of dialogue, though, it offers little that feels specifically South African. In fact, overall, the dialogue is no more than serviceable. It’s often repetitive and adds no new layers of character as the movie proceeds.
The race for representation
None of this (apart from the dull dialogue) would be a problem but for the fact that South African filmmaking is engaged in what Lucia Saks, in her book Cinema in a Democratic South Africa, calls “the race for representation”.
This means both the race to represent South Africans on cinema screens and the desire to have more people of colour involved in making movies. But cinema is an expensive industry, hence the requirements articulated in the National Film and Video Foundation’s “value charter”: to build “a South African film and video industry that mirrors and represents the nation [and] sustains commercial viability”.
Yet it may be that these two aims are mutually exclusive — at least for now.
We have yet to hit upon a formula that marries the job of mirroring “the nation” and the business of making money. The nation-representing part really just means South Africans telling South African stories, but at this point in our history there aren’t enough South Africans willing or able to pay South African money to go and see them.
So they aren’t commercially viable in the domestic market. The exceptions are Leon Schuster’s comedies and a few low-level Afrikaans farces, but we don’t want to call that representing the nation, do we?
Starting with the basics
It’s as though a filmmaker like Vundla has, perhaps sensibly, decided that commerce comes first. Make movies that make money, then worry about mirroring the nation. Sure, crime is a huge South African issue, and gangsterism part of our social fabric, but Vundla’s not making an “issue picture”. He’s making a commercial movie and, in a marketplace dominated by American product, that seems to mean imitating American forms and styles.
Is that the way to go? I’ve argued before that, in a slowly emerging market, South Africa perhaps needs genre movies before it needs the big-issue films — shoot-’em-ups and comedies before high art and moral seriousness. But then I wonder whether basic economic conditions don’t mean that neither kinds of movie stand much of a chance. It’s a hard one.
Those contextual questions aside, and relieving Vundla of the responsibility of mirroring the nation, How to Steal Two Million is a good movie. It’s a gritty noir that just happens to be set in Jo’burg, and the central performances (Ngubane, Rapulana Seiphemo, Hlubi Mboya) have an appealing toughness and directness. It’s entirely gripping and well put-together; the coolly bleak cinematography makes Jo’burg look like just the place for such backstabbing and gunplay. It even has a bit of tortured romance.
If nothing else, Vundla has successfully appropriated an American genre and given it a South African spin. Let’s hope it earns some millions.