Reviews

The tragedy of a life not lived


Skoonheid, writer-director Oliver Hermanus’s follow-up to his debut film Shirley Adams, has recently been released on the local cinema circuit after becoming the first film with a primarily Afrikaans dialogue to be screened at the International Cannes film festival. After winning the unofficial Queer Palm award at the festival, an award initiated last year to give special recognition to films that deal with LGBT issues, I was expecting Skoonheid to be a step above the normal slapstick variety of cinema that seems to satiate the bulk of our local audiences (see the recent Schuster-Bakgat-Liefling continuum of offerings). Elisabeth Quin, novelist, journalist and the jury president of the Queer palm praised the film as “true cinema”, unpleasant at first sight, and “very disturbing, hard-hitting, radical”, so I went to the cinema with a sense of expectation.

Fortunately Hermanus’s film, a tale of a repressed, middle-aged Afrikaner man, François (Deon Lotz), spiralling out of control in his obsession with an old friend’s attractive son, is indeed a radical departure from the usual content of our mainstream cinema and, as other critics have pointed out, is a benchmark in terms of its cinematography, production quality and a strong performance by Lotz. Set primarily in Bloemfontein and Cape Town, the film explores the dangerous ways in which François, apparently unable to deal with his sexual desires, has compartmentalised his life. Skoonheid is a subtle critique of (Afrikaner) hypermasculinity that showcases promising new directorial talent and further opens up South Africa’s potential as a largely unexplored country of the “Cine-World” (as French daily newspaper Libération would say).

The title of the film, which translates as “beauty” but also as “cleanliness,” relates not only to the beautiful Christiaan (Charlie Keegan) with whom François is so obsessed, but also to a more ambiguous symbolic trope indicated by François’ continuous washing of his hands and the algae green swimming pool that is his responsibility to clean; perhaps commenting on the proverbial act of “sweeping the dust underneath the rug”. However, the film does not resolve the anxieties of a double life with an expected “coming out” moment. Unlike the usual mainstream offerings, the film asks its audience to read and interpret more complex filmic codes. It has a brooding atmosphere with François often framed by dark passages and enclosed spaces. After a scene in which he has orgiastic gay sex, the sense of anxiety is intensified as François unflinchingly performs an acceptable version of Afrikaner masculinity: the conservatively dressed man, able to provide financially for his wife (who, ironically, is having an affair of her own), who appears as the respectable “oom François.” Later, when he spies on his wife as she greets, what we presume to be, her lover, the passivity and indifference of his reaction further signal the precariousness of François’ situation and his conflicted sense of masculinity.

The film moves at a fittingly slow pace from one meticulously crafted scene to the next and ultimately hits audiences with a raw, unexpected climactic “bang”, when François finally gets Christiaan alone (from what I’ve heard and from my own experience there have been quite a number of walkouts at this climactic scene).

François’ apparent self-loathing springs from his identification with a culture of (Afrikaner) hypermasculinity, the kind I associate with the era of Afrikaner nationalism, the time of the Border war, and of “Volk en Vaderland”; perpetuating the ideal of the man’s man and not being able to show anything other than the most fraternal of sentiments towards other men. Thus François’ performance of masculinity, a central concern of the film, is desperately constituted by a public denial of the homoerotic. He seems to be the materialisation of a culture of homosexual panic, to appropriate Eve Sedgwick’s term, continuously anxious about his performance of masculinity, that it should conceal the possibility (and in this case, the reality) of his homoerotic desires. This links to the trope of cleanliness or the sanitised — a sort of fetish for boundary purity — by ironically keeping the effeminate and racially “unclean” outside. As one of the men before François’ regular sex meeting says when he chases a member of their group away who brought a brown skinned gay youth along: “Geen moffies of coloureds nie”! [No gays or coloureds allowed!].

However, François’ commuting between having casual sex with other white men, managing his timber business and being a respectable father is interrupted by Christiaan. He becomes the only stimulating interest, perhaps precisely because it is so impossibly taboo, in François’ world. The audience shares the awkward position of his voyeurism, often watching Christiaan from afar, as Hermanus’s camera work exquisitely captures François’ careful observations. In one scene, where François is on campus looking down at Christiaan socialising with friends, Christiaan greets a male friend with a kiss, and François gently smiles. François’ yearning for Christiaan seems rooted in envy and desire, but it is also inexpressible, insatiable and eventually becomes unmanageable.

During a seminar at the University of Stellenbosch, Hermanus commented on Christiaan’s beauty as something specifically poisonous and dangerous to François. He further referenced Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice (1912) as inspiration. However, as Shaun Viljoen pointed out in a recent conversation about the film, unlike Tadzio’s beauty in Mann’s novel, Christiaan’s allure is mainly  sexual, rather than being more symbolic of a larger beauty, an alternative “beautiful” life (of which a new sexuality is a part), as is the quest of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Christiaan seems to me a kind of l’amour fatal for François — with no hope of reciprocated attraction, François’ obsession intensifies to the point of violent possession.

Skoonheid deserves its “queer”-labelled award, in the way that the term suggests a potent way of penetrating (no pun intended) the in-between spaces, of straying from the usual path and telling the stories that are normally only silences. It is also a film that necessarily has silences of its own and contains possibilities only hinted at. The poignant scene near the end of the film still haunts me: in this brief scene in Bloemfontein’s Spur, François sits and stares at two younger men who seem to be in love. They playfully share a kiss and when they notice François staring at them, they assume that he is disapproving. The irony of the scene makes François’ repression and his violent acting out an even more potent reflection on a life spiralling down in darkness, the tragedy of a life not lived.

 

 

 

Comments

Francois says:

Thanks Denise. Yes, I have to agree with you. To describe it as “subtle” might be an understatement. I suppose I had originally meant that the film was nuanced in the way that it moves between the tale of a man undone by beauty and a more general critique of the culture of Afrikaner hypermasculinity (a gender identity which is in part constituted by a performance of masculinity irreconcilable with the homoerotic).

Denise says:

Francois! Great piece. But I don’t know about “subtle critique”. Let’s chat!

Greg says:

Great piece. Here is another great take on this by Mahala’s film critic, Kavish Chetty: http://www.mahala.co.za/movies/skoonheid/

Leonski says:

A fine review of a deeply disturbing account of South African white hypermasculinity meeting its Moses in the form of Beauty. Can white South African masculinity in the (secretly bent) ‘straight’ mode cope with masculine beauty? Apparently not. In the face of it, the only answer it knows is sadly predictable: violent fucking and rape. If you have to have it, take it with force! How sad. How very, very sad.