‘Moffie’ drama addresses homophobia at glacial pace
In the gelatinously paced South African gay drama “Moffie,” Kai Luke Brummer plays Nicholas van der Swart, a young gay man in 1981 South Africa, who is about to go off to serve his mandatory year in the armed forces at a time when apartheid South Africa is battling communist forces in its northern neighbor Angola. At his farewell party, which is attended by his father (Michael Kirch), stepfather and mother (Barbara-Marie Immelman), Nicholas, who is deeply in the closet, is given a hetero-adult magazine to keep him company (thanks, Dad). Dad also encourages Nicholas to “show them what you’re made of.”
After brutal transportation by train and truck, Nicholas finds the drill sergeant (Jacques Theron) is a sadist and the barracks life a flatulent hell of toxic masculinity. In addition to being hardcore racists and frequent violent drunkards, most of the recruits are raging homophobes. Two recruits caught in the clutch in a bathroom
stall are beaten with bags full of gun parts and sent to Ward 22, which is a euphemism for the army nuthouse. Nicholas, who is handsome with blue eyes and a mop of sandy hair, tries, as someone remarks, “to be invisible.” But can he maintain the facade?
Also among the recruits are Sachs (Mathew Vey), who cleans his rifle with Nicholas, shares cigarettes and sings along with him to some song, and Stassen (Ryan de Villiers), whose insolent manner attracts the drill sergeant’s attention and stokes his rage. “Moffie” is an Afrikaans anti-homosexual
slur, which the drill sergeant makes all recruits shout at the top of their lungs. It’s like a more gay “Billy Budd.” “Moffie” is not subtle, but it’s an interesting and at times moving look at a dying, criminal culture that, among other things, institutionalized the abuse of gay people.
Nicholas repeatedly flashes back to a time when he was a boy and an adult man caught him looking at an older boy in a shower. The traumatic memory is shocking, and far better staged than a nighttime moonlit attack upon what I guessed was a
communist encampment by Nicholas and his fellow soldiers. Do they really not wear helmets? For that matter, why do these soldiers have such shaggy hair? This is certainly not “Platoon” or “Full Metal Jacket.”
The film’s score runs the gamut from electronica and “Summer Breeze” to Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in G Minor and German lieder.
Moffie” is certainly a breakout turn by Brummer, who has some TV credits. The actor brings Nicholas’s inner turmoil to life. We’ll be seeing more of him. But the film moves so slowly you think if they’d speed it up it’d be half an hour shorter. “Moffie” has its moments, largely thanks to Brummer. But the film often has jasmine in its mind.
(“Moffie” contains violence, profanity and racist and homophobic slurs.)