Treating SA movies as foreign could help

TAKE other places that are enormous distances from the global metropoles, like Kyrgyzstan, say, so remote that even the vowel supply has been choked off, or Arizona, half a time zone and a few light-years from California. Or the Rub al Khali might qualify, or St Helena, Yorkshire, Easter Island…

Places like those, how do they treat their own culture, their artworks and theatre and movies and so forth?

When a boytjie from among them comes up with something where they recognise the streets, the hills, the lakes, do they tell each other “hey, lekker”, (or equivalent) “let’s go see this movie about us”?

Or is there some weird thing that puts them off? They assume that local means lectury, or politically correct, or mawkish? So they look for a clone movie, 25 car crashes and 12 knife fights, from one of those nine-letter words whose last eight letters are “-ollywood”. Probably a movie that occupied the actors from lunch until tea-time, and the special-effects guys for months or years.

A few years ago, Craig Freimond’s movie Material received Standard Local-Product Media Treatment, an orgasm of “Local! Must-see!”

I didn’t see it, while it was on circuit. I felt vaguely guilty. When I did get to it, too late to contribute to box-office or buzz, I didn’t come away saying “that was good, for a local movie”. I said “that was good”.

Why hadn’t I taken it in earlier, then? One reason is that I’d seen those words too often, “Local! Must-see!” They were repeatedly said of two of the three movies that ever made me walk out of a cinema, irritatingly pushing past people’s knees with your bum in their nose.

(The third was Kill Bill, horrible violence; the locals can stay anon, their makers have had pain enough.)

Moreover, Material had exposed me – not with a heavy ladle; glimpses, a feel – to a culture that isn’t mine. If I was getting that about Kyrgyzstan, say, I’d automatically lap it up. But getting it about somewhere that is five minutes from home…?

That’s complicated. When you actually get it, you lap it up twice as much. But in advance, maybe one is scared of getting it, feeling stupid, oughtn’t you to know it already?

Now Craig returns with Beyond the River, well greeted with four recurring phrases: (i) local, (ii) must-see, (iii) feelgood, (iv) nail-biting.

As to “nail-biting”, they must be joking. The tale has its twists, yes, but “feel-good” tells you how they end, and the whole movie exudes assurance that you won’t walk out mournful.

How’s box-office? On its prime weekend River was South Africa’s seventhmost-watched movie, pulling in 7% of the 10 million rand taken by Fast and Furious 8.

You can guess that Fast and Furious scores low with the critics, though one hits the nail on the head: “You know what you’re getting, and you get it”, that being car crashes, multiple burstings into screen-engulfing flames, exotic vehicles hurtling across ice that a pursuing Russian submarine is devouring, etc. (Russia the bad-guy again, hey? Perestroika break evidently over).

Accepting that skop, skiet en donner will always do best, what might help an SA item score better with SA audiences?

Maybe treating it as if it was foreign – Ukrainian, Iranian, Romanian, whatever – “strong, decent, human story, well told, spectacularly well filmed, rarely excellent music treatment and rarer breathtaking visuals of both beautiful landscapes and the other kind, neat insights into lives lived… er, oh, by the way, pretty close to you”? Just asking.