All about that disappointment
SOMETHING interesting is happening in the South African film industry – our new-found love for the romantic film seems to go hand in hand with a quasi-pan Africanism that sees South African stories integrating actors from around the continent.
The success of this has been varied and it is clear that often this is a practical decision to help the film reach as wide an audience as possible as opposed to it being a narrative necessity.
Adze Ugah can do better on this. I say this only because Adze has done better than this. As director of Isibaya he has established the visual language of arguably one of the most beloved soapies in Mzansi. His understanding of the camera as character and how it can operate both within and outside of the boundaries of the story is what makes his work so captivating.
Couple that with a keen eye for compelling cinematography and you’ve got one of the most exciting visual storytellers on the continent.
In his latest film, All About Love, this, however, is not on display. Yes there are genuine moments of cinematic flair in the technical aspects of the film but the narrative itself falls far too short that even the attractive images cannot salvage it.
The film which stars Nomzamo Mbatha, Katlego Danke and Zenande Mfenyana, along with Richard Lukunku, Chris Attoh and Leroy Gopal is about a love triangle, or perhaps I should say a love pentagon. We see five adults flow in and out of relationships.
The tropes of backstabbing, revenge and regret bubble up repeatedly in predictable ways.
It’s a difficult thing to describe because it’s a film win which the story is about love but the ideas that drive the film are vague at best. In cinema there is historical time as well as narrative time. The latter in this film was played with in ways that border on the surreal.
At some point I was wondering if Ugah was making fun of the tropes and mishaps that often plague “African films”, as far as narrative sense and subverting them goes. After a while, however, I realised that something had gone profoundly wrong here.
The whole film feels misplaced. Because it has so many cultural lines to try to balance, in an attempt to be something to everyone, the film ends up being nothing to anybody.
The failure of All About Love is that it tries to beautify some of the aesthetics of Nollywood and transpose them into a South African context. The over-thetop acting, the underwhelming multiple story structure and convenient narrative turns, all converge to create a cinematic disappointment.
By the time the whole thing was over I was left cold in my seat. I could not even summon the strength to be harsh on the film. Because I imagine the people involved in it were disappointed at the outcome.
I was hoping they would at least have had the dignity to Alan Smithee themselves in the credits. But they didn’t and I guess that is no surprise, All About Love is a film defined by poor decisionmaking.