The tragedy of women is highlighted in Oliver Hermanus’s brave new movie, writes Theresa Smith
DIRECTOR Oliver Hermanus grins as he calls his third film, The Endless River, a Garden Route tourism production.
Shot over two months in autumn two years ago, it was filmed in Riviersonderend, Plettenberg Bay, up the Garden Route to Nature’s Valley with interior shots done in Cape Town and Paarl.
It opens with wide shots of very recognisable Garden Route skies and sunsets, and features large tracking shots through the Wilderness, over the Blaauwkrans bridge and onto very familiar beaches.
He spent more than nine months editing the film, mostly in Plettenberg Bay to hold onto the feel of the place.Hermanus’s father worked on the N2 expansion project back in the ’80s and built a house in Plettenberg Bay for the family. He, his brother and sister, went to school in Port Elizabeth and spent a vast portion of their formative years travelling between Plett and PE. “So this film makes reference to a lot of the places I spent time in,” he says.
While The Endless River as a title does reference Riviersonderend as main character Tiny’s (Crystal Donna Roberts) home town, “it’s also symbolic of the idea of cyclical violence and cyclical relationships”.
In the story, Frenchman Gilles (Nicolas Duvauchelle) has to deal with his family’s brutal murder on a remote farm near Riviersonderend. He strikes up a relationship with Tiny, herself in the throes of dealing with her husband’s mysterious death.
“The story is about blame, he (Gilles) blames the police, his wife blames him (for sticking them in a remote place), the police blame the system and the jails. The only character who seemingly doesn’t blame anyone is her (Tiny).”
“Her name is Tiny and she says it’s not her real name but we never know what her real name is and it is this empty, blank character who has so little space or agency in the world who turns out to be the most resilient of them all,” says Hermanus.
“It’s a tragedy, the women in this film. Tiny is being instructed by her mother to not try anything special with her life. She’s been waiting for her husband to come out of jail, for four years.That fascinated me.
“Me driving through that particular town and stopping at that particular garage and having lunch for 30 minutes, meeting a waitress I met as a 10-year-old, as a 20-year-old, as a 30-year-old. It’s never the actual same woman, just the next version of that woman who is 24, 25. She can tell people are from different parts of the world because of the way they speak, but she’s never been anywhere. Her only frame of reference is these 30-minute conversations with foreigners.
“Riviersonderend isn’t this huge tourist attraction, so people generally stop to refuel and I always just thought it was such an extreme contrast between me, coloured person, and waitress, coloured person in a small town because they would always think I was foreign. Maybe it is the way I speak, the clothes I was wearing, the cars I was driving, I don’t know.
“The town’s name may be poetic – river without end – but it is the people that he found more fascinating: “Who are these people, where do they go, what are their lives, what happens when things happen to them, what kind of recourse do they have to the judicial system?
“Denise Newman plays Tiny’s mother as a strong matriarch who believes she has protected her daughter by keeping her timid and afraid of the world.”
For international audiences, The Endless River has been a strange film because of Skoonheid.
“Taking that film overseas, there wasn’t such complexity of South African nuance to have to understand. That character, a white Afrikaans man, although the international audience didn’t know much about the fabric of being Afrikaans they knew enough about white people, white South Africans, them being in power and the assumption that all white South Africans are racist and they had enough information about the country to be able to see into it.”
Hermanus was shocked by what audiences at international film festivals assumed about coloured people though, specifically Tiny. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival (the first South African film to do so in competition) and has also played in Toronto, Busan, London, Mumbai, Dubai, São Paulo, Gothenburg, Carthage, Miami, Minneapolis and recently in Sydney.
“They don’t understand her race, they think she’s black or that her father is some missing white man because her mother is obviously not,” he says.
“I was made so aware of the fact that coloured people’s lives or colouredness… even when you say the word coloured overseas, people get a fright. When you say coloured they find it uncomfortable, they don’t like the terminology, especially in places like Sweden and Belgium.
“The thing that riled me up a little about telling the story of Tiny and her life in this way was that it only reinforces how little of the complexities of South African life are being seen by people around the world.
“What other narratives are there about contemporary coloured women that the world has seen, in literature or plays?”
“They would never ask you these things in an interview,” says Hermanus.
“Talking about race is complex, especially when the word coloured is involved. White journalists don’t want to ask 'are you a coloured man’, and they’re not going to ask 'are these people coloured’ because that sentence structure is problematic. So they wrote about it in the reviews and would say this character is 'black’, and I would just read these assumptions about a black woman and white man because a lot of them just assumed it was about an inter-racial love affair and she was just really an interesting black woman. Then again, in certain parts of America, maybe she does look black.”
“I refused to make this movie for an international audience where I have to explain everything,” he says.
“So, if you didn’t understand… for example there’s this moment when Tiny is at the police station and her mother walks in and she screams 'mammie’ and she starts crying. There’s something about the way I knew this was going to happen in terms of how Crystal’s performance would be like a little girl, the way she says 'mammie’ and she’s afraid until her mother arrives. She needs her mother and the mother is such a strong figure in coloured society, whether your actual mother or the mother figure.”
“Those kinds of moments are so real to me and I didn’t even have to explain it to Crystal, (but) those are completely not interpreted outside of our shores. So it’s weird to have made this movie and yet no-one here has seen it.
“I do wonder what a woman from Riviersonderend would think about it. Would she ever see it? I find it interesting, the possibility that this could be a window into a reality that she might recognise,” says Hermanus.
• The Endless River opens tomorrow.
Cape Argus