SEUN
DIRECTOR: Darrell Roodt
CAST: Elzette Maarschalk, Chris de Clerq, Deanre Reiners, Candice Weber
CLASSIFICATION: 16
RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes
RATING: ***
DESPITE only a two-week film shoot, there is a lot that happens in this film. The idea of conscriptees to the South African Border War being emotionally affected by what they did/ saw but never talking about it is interesting and this film is shorthand for the whole idea.
The eponymous character is Paul (Reiners) who has just matriculated and spends his last carefree summer on his parents’ farm before entering into military service.
Paul is shown to be a dutiful son with aspirations to become a doctor, though totally understanding of his father’s wish that he become a farmer since he is the only child.
Parents Johannes (De Clerq) and Aletta (Maarschalk) are shown to be salt-of-the-earth types – Mom dotes, maybe a little too much, on him and Dad is quietly very proud. Farm life is painted as bucolic; hard work, but satisfying.
Director Roodt’s love of lensing wide, open spaces makes the most of gorgeous Karoo sunsets and a lot of time is spent on Paul romancing the sweet girl from the farm next door, Annemarie (Weber).
So much time is spent presaging this idea of him being conscripted that the actual army trip is scant in comparison.
It being 1981, Paul ends up on the Angolan border (for only a few scenes) and comes back in a wheelchair after risking himself to help an injured compatriot.
At this point the story quickly shifts to the difficulty of looking after people with disability and Maarschalk, especially, creates a complex character – Aletta’s motherly instinct to take care of her child is almost overridden by the sheer difficulty and weirdness of a situation that makes of her the intimate caretaker of a grown-up man, but her sense of duty will not allow anything else.
Slowly Johannes’ story becomes fore-grounded as he too struggles with his sense of duty as father, his love for his child and the stoicism imprinted on him thanks to Afrikaner culture which impresses on him the need to suppress any overt expression of emotion.
At the same time Annemarie has to come to grips with her initial revulsion of Paul’s circumstances – understandable because of her tender age and innocence, but shocking nonetheless.
Each of the three have their own breaking point, which they battle through on their own, never thinking to share how they feel and therefore never understanding that they all experience the same thing. And through all of this Paul has to struggle with not having any agency in what happens to him.
The film concentrates so much on the build-up to the army stint, that everything else feels like denouement, yet that very everything else is the more interesting part of the story.
It paints this nostalgic and deeply sad picture of how messed up and conflicted an entire generation of Afrikaners are about conscription and how they don’t talk about it.
But, the jarring episodic nature of the film – the way it skips from blossoming love story to short, crazy army stint to a story about the difficult of caring for paraplegics to an interrogation of dutiful Afrikaner culture – means it never coalesces into something more than the sum of its parts.
It will find purchase among people who can emphathise with the calamity that befalls Paul, but give us little understanding for how PTSD has inveigled its way into South African culture at large.
If you liked Meisie or Stilte, you will like this.