Great shots, but a bit off target
A grand cinematic experiment, fails to resolve its themes as a South African western
‘The land” is a generous metaphor in South Africa. We have “the land” as tied to economic downturn and VAT increases. There is “the land” divvied up in the inverted logic that turns owners into slaves. Then there is “the land” about to be expropriated without compensation but probably not.
The makers of Five Fingers for Marseilles (primarily writer Sean Drummond and director Michael Matthews) understand the value of the land as currency, both historically and in a contemporary sense — hence its evocative use in the cinematography throughout the film. But there are gaps in how consistently the land is wielded as a metaphor in the storyline.
Early on, we learn rather starkly about the period our story begins, with a radio broadcast in a gang hangout speaking about the Constitution being used to maintain the status quo rather than as a way to achieve redress.
The radio clip, stopped at exactly the right point after it has served its purpose, outlines the film’s moral conflict — one that emanates from the past but is contemporary.
The film begins in the late apartheid era, centring on a gang called the Five Fingers, who protect the black folk of Marseilles from police harassment. After a violent incident, the leader of the group, Tau, vanishes from Marseilles and its township of Railway, reappearing 15 years later. When our hero Tau returns, Railway is a collection of RDP hovels and must be saved from an invading gang.
At this point, the pacing of the film slows down considerably, perhaps to mimic the conventions of the western movie genre.
When directors make such decisive choices, it is in the knowledge that the cinematography will complement their story. There is great cinematography in Five Fingers — but cinematography is pretty much all there is.
The deliberate pacing, not to mention the long, lingering shots of the land (and interiors of bars), are a way of milking the best out of an existing formula. There are many scenes in which Five Fingers makes a pretence of suspense, with the action being drawn out, only for the directors to turn around and walk us back through it, using obvious cues that should ordinarily be subtle.
For example, how long does it take to recognise someone who left town a mere 15 years ago? By the time we see Tau’s slingshot (the Five Fingers used these as weapons in their youth), the audience already understands how he fits into the milieu of the story. It is a moment of wasted symbolism.
There are a string of these visual cues whose only apparent purpose is to infantilise the viewer, unnecessarily leading us by the hand. This becomes awkward, because the audience is a step ahead of the lumbering pace and pretty much every western trope.
Yet you can’t help but be bewitched by the picture, which seems resolute in contrasting dark, atmospheric interiors with parched but picturesque views of the cliff faces of the Maluti Mountains.
And the actors, even when they are hamming it up, have a strangely entertaining quality to them. This is true particularly of Hamilton Dlamini, who plays the invading villain, Ghost. Dlamini, a veteran actor with an overly fidgety manner better suited to the stage, changes this to great effect in Five Fingers, inverting his presence into a slow, deliberate, baritone drawl that does wonders for the dramatic effect of this film. He is the archetypal western villain. The magic of Dlamini’s Ghost is right there in his ostentation — the ridiculousness of it all.
There are plenty of these moments in the film, when one gets the sense that the western was force-fitted into the South African context. But this is not cut and dried. For me, the fine line of Marseilles is perhaps best represented by the performance of Kenneth Nkosi, more so than the character he plays.
Nkosi is more suited to the outlandish humour of White Wedding, for instance, than the dodgy bureaucrat he plays in this film. But he palpably hones his character, bringing an accidental, satirical goofiness to the table. It’s a quality that is both suited to how we caricature the ventricose politician but one that also strikes at the heart of what might just be Five Fingers For Marseilles’s downfall.
Perhaps the mistake of the film is that it attempts to “westernise” a historical context in which these tropes already exist in other intrinsic forms.
So what one gets is an experiment that aimed for authenticity coming out instead like a square peg in a round hole. The archetypal nature of western storylines fail to deal adequately with the myriad complexities of the South African condition.
For example, in the town itself, we fail to see the intricacies of the transition from apartheid to the New Marseilles, or should I say the “new” South Africa. We fail to see the lingering white presence in these spaces and how these interact with black dominance in the form of governance. The suggestion, by the faded farm signs, is that the white people have all but disappeared. What we are left with is an outlaw economy. This is interpretively a South African phenomenon, yes, but one that fails to grapple fully with the metaphor of land, at least as alluded to at the beginning of the film. It is a missed opportunity, considering the continued insularity of similar small towns in real-life South Africa.
The mayor, who is the grown-up Pockets (played by Nkosi), and erstwhile member of the Five Fingers, becomes a stereotype when viewed through this lens.
Sesotho-speakers who have seen this film have had much to say about the alleged butchering of the language. That is a conversation I’m unable to get into, because of my lack of understanding of the language. All of this is not to rubbish the experiment that is Five Fingers completely, except to say that it got lost in the translation of its own motives. As an experiment, though, it is now one that serves as a template to be improved upon.