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Moffie
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Starring: Kai Luke Brummer, Ryan de Villiers
5/5
What can I say about Moffie that hasn’t already been said?
Lauded South African film maker Oliver Hermanus’ new film has been praised by every critic who’s watched it as audacious film making, powerful in showing homophobia, toxic masculinity and the oppressive tactics of the apartheid-era state.
And all the praise is earned.
In typical Hermanus fashion, it slices to the bone and you’ll emerge from the cinema rattled and with your head buzzing.
I have often said that Hermanus’ 2011 film Skoonheid (Beauty) is the best South African film ever made.
It’s a piece of cinema so local yet so far reaching, so bleak yet incisive, so illuminating of the Afrikaans male condition that I haven’t stopped thinking about it in the nine years since I saw it.
Moffie comes close.
Based on the 2006 autobiographical novel by Andre Carl van der Merwe, it follows two young gay men – Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) and Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Villiers) – during their compulsory military service as they train in preparation for war on the Angolan border.
These were deep apartheid-era years, a time when the SA Defence Force (SADF) was vicious and ludicrous enough to submit men it deemed gay to a medical torture programme it called The Aversion Project to “cure” them.
This involved exposing them to images of men and shocking them if they showed physical arousal. In the cases where this failed, they put patients through a sex change operation.
Yes, you read that right. The SADF did that.
Moffie does not delve into the happenings of The Aversion Project, but focuses on the personal struggles of Nicholas and Dylan as they wrestle with their romantic and sexual feelings in a suffocating system.
With a glimmer of humour, Hermanus also shows the viewer what a homoerotic paradise the army could be. Scenes of glowing young men in their physical prime while showering, playing volleyball and swimming naked show the irony of oppressing homosexuality in an environment where gay men were interacting only with men.
A recent video series by Jacaranda FM asked gay Afrikaans public figures, including Armand Aucamp, Casper de Vries, Pieter Dirk-Uys and Rian van Heerden, to talk about their own experiences with the word ‘moffie’.
Translated into English as faggot, the men recounted the shame, the confusion and the anger of being slandered by this term.
What resonates is that these words – and Nguni words such as ‘isitabane’ – have in no way disappeared.
Ultimately, the film shows the impact of autocratic regimes on the individual and the far-reaching consequences of that.
Moffie is another powerful addition to the Hermanus canon, and I can’t wait to see what this film maker will do next.
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