Love is a most insidious weapon
Kavish Chetty talks to SA filmmaker Jenna Bass about the horror of romance
SOCIAL conspiracies tell us that true love is the ultimate existential fulfilment, bursting with the sensations of ecstasy. But love, as young filmmaker Jenna Bass speculates in her imaginative new film, is not simply “a glorious pink-hearted object”. It is a vortex of stormy emotion, angstridden and restless.
Love the One You Love is a marvellous experiment of a film, an intimate adventure into the undersides of the romantic myth. Set in Cape Town, it follows the lives of phone-sex seductress Terri (Chiedza Mhende) and dog handler Sandile (Andile Nebulane), as their relationship begins to take on the sense that cosmic forces are dragging them along.
Bass has restored the conspiratorial dimension to love. “So much of our lives are spent thinking, agonising and dreaming about love,” she says. “We idealise something which, at least in my experience, is not idealisable.” Her film reimagines love as “a grand illusion that gives us hope for the future”. She offers intriguing connections between the dynamics of love and our vaster national myths of a fully reconciled and rainbow society.
Love the One is all about microscopic explorations of emotion, mapped out on faces. As the camera leaps into close-up, you’re made into a detective of physiognomy — investigating the hidden meanings in a half-glimpsed smile, or wondering about those expressive tilts of eyebrow, or that nervous laughter. The actors, including Louw Venter and Dayaan Salie, filled out their skeletal roles with improvised dialogue, electric speech and natural comic charm.
“I have a major love affair with dialogue,” says Bass. “I love the way people speak and the mistakes they make. I love the way cinema allows you to get close to the little things people can’t hide.”
These natural speech patterns, filled with telltale hesitations and outbursts, give the viewer a sense of voyeurism, as though we’re spying on couples as they hang around in exquisite vulnerability. True to the multiple sensations of love, the film also hurtles between emotional registers: sensual euphoria and dread, joyousness and alienation.
Bass says her goal was to capture “the sheer horror of love”. In horror cinema, she says, the monster is external. But in love, “your body, intellect and emotion are all conspiring against you at once”. Love the One, which won Best SA Feature at the Durban Film Festival, captures the perplexing sense of ambiguity that defines our emotional and social lives. LS Kavish.chetty@gmail.com @kavishchetty