David Farnor | On 26, Apr 2020

Director: Oliver Hermanus
Cast: Kai Luke Brummer, Ryan de Villiers, Hilton Pelser
Certificate: 18

“Sugar man, won’t you hurry, Cause I’m tired of these scenes. For a blue coin won’t you bring back All those colors to my dreams…” The words of Rodriguez ring out several times in Moffie, the new film from Oliver Hermanus. Introduced to the world in the feel-good documentary Searching for Sugar Man, which celebrated the unsung singer’s hidden talent, the song was a hit in apartheid-era South Africa when first released, and Moffie uses it as a lightning rod to immerse us in that harrowing time – when longing to escape the everyday scenes of conflict and prejudice carries a melancholic, yearning urgency.

The film follows Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), a teen on the cusp of adulthood who is sent away to join the army. Despite his Afrikaans surname, he’s an outsider, and that becomes clear all too soon, as he’s dropped into a world of torment and bullying – all in the name of training young men to fight on the Angolan border for a purportedly noble cause. Before he goes, a clue is given as to why, when he’s given an adult mag to take with him for ammunition.

The clue comes much sooner for us in the audience, though: the title, Moffie, is slang for “faggot”, and that boldly controversial choice of title sets the tone for what follows: the word is used repeatedly throughout, from childhood banter through to frontline abuse, as it’s made clear that the ruling men think the worst thing anyone could ever be is a homosexual.

Its a terrifying environment to grow up in, especially for any closeted young men, and Oliver Hermanus captures that in alarming, distressing detail – while the black-white divide in the country at the time has been covered on screen before, this sensitively highlights the lesser seen, insidious persecution that was also going on. A flashback to a swimming pool incident, which is blown up from an innocent glance to a hostile tirade, makes it clear how embedded in the society’s mentality homophobia is, and by the time we’re in a military landscape, that masculine expectation is decidedly toxic. (Hilton Pelser is particularly nasty as the brutally sadistic Sergeant Brand, who sends conscripts showing any sign of weakness to run to a distant forest to bring him a leaf.)

Hermanus’ earlier film Beauty strikingly depicted the internal self-loathing of a gay man who kept his sexuality concealed. Here, the director achieves the same level of emotional impact with the portrait of a soldier longing to express himself while the loathing comes from external forces around him. Amid that pressure, there’s the faintest flicker of attraction and relief, as Nicholas crosses paths with fellow squad member Stassen (Ryan de Villiers).

The script, based on the autobiographical 2006 novel by André Carl van der Merwe, delicately treads the line between wider oppression and that brief hope. Hermanus echoes that balance by bringing a warmth to the cruel environment around his remarkable leading man – a colour that chimes in with Sugar Man’s ode to dreaming in the face of a tiring existence. Like the song, which is here given a haunting new resonance, it’ll stay with you after the credits have rolled.

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