MOVIE REVIEW: Hollywood in My Huis

Published Jun 26, 2015

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HOLLYWOOD IN MY HUIS

DIRECTOR: Corne van Rooyen

CAST: Christia Visser, Edwin van der Walt, Nicola Hanekom, Louw Venter, Lida Botha and Marga van Rooy

CLASSIFICATION: 7-9 PG

RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes

RATING: ***

THIS is a solid, sweet little romance story for tweens and teens, presented in Afrikaans, but with a wider appeal than just that niche market.

Centred on a matric student’s quest to have an amazing matric ball, the film has a serious underlying message of appreciating what you have in front of you, but doesn’t belabour the point too much. There’s singing and dancing in a funny dream sequence, two sides to the matric ball (is it a senseless tradition for sheep, or the moment of a lifetime?) and an overall satisfying experience.

Said student is Jana van Tonder (Visser), who late one night sleepily watches Charlize Theron pick up an Oscar and dedicate it to the South Africans watching her.

Enamoured by the glamour of the Benoni girl who made good, Jana decides to have her own moment in the spotlight (she is actually a bit of a wallflower) when the matric ball committee at her school decide the event will be themed the Oscars.

Enlisting the help of her best friend down the road, down-to-earth Frikkie (van der Walt), who is secretly in love with her, Jana engineers the perfect date and frantically starts sewing the dress.

Jana firmly believes that if only she can have the perfect dreamboy on her arm, her life will be sorted, and the lengths we go to to make the evening a special one are shown, but there is more to the movie than just that one day.

Writer and director Corne van Rooyen deftly incorporates Jana’s matric ball dreams into a broader story of “don’t always think that achieving big, impossible dreams will make your life perfect, look at what you have now and don’t concentrate so hard on what you don’t have”.

Jana’s mother Beatrice runs a beauty salon from a caravan in their front garden and is constantly pushing Jana to do better. Beatrice gets so caught up in shepherding Jana not to repeat her own mistakes that she forgets to give the child space to become herself.

Hanekom makes of the mother character a study of fragile poignancy lurking under a brittle shell, but underplays it just enough not to steal the sunshine from Visser.

Beatrice is harsh on not only her child, but also her dreamer of an unemployed husband, Tos van Tonder, (Venter). Tos adores his wife and child and Venter makes of the character an unexpectedly tender one.

More gentle rom than outright com, this is the un-Hollywood version of the prom, complete with the big night on which parents come up with the craziest way to ferry their kids to the pimped out venue.

On paper it might seem like you’re about to get Sixteen Candles in Afrikaans, but thankfully this is its own story, familiar because it is South African, not because you’ve seen it before in a different guise.

If you liked Leading Lady or Lien se Lankstaanskoene, you will like this.

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