[star rating=”2″] REVIEW: FAREWELL ELLA BELLA. Written and directed by Lwazi Mvusi with Jade Anstey, Sello Maake Ka-Ncube and Lionel Newton.
MEGAN FURNISS reviews
A new South African feature film, Farewell Ella Bella, is a jumble of ideas, characters and landscapes that are so erratic and unconvincing all they do is confuse.
Written and directed by Lwazi Mvusi, the story of Farewell Ella Bella centres around a young white woman and her family.
After the death of her alcoholic father, 24 year-old Ella is fetched by her godfather, Neo, a black jazz musician who used to play gigs with her father (and, her mother, we discover later). We also find out later that the strange place she is fetched from is Beaufort West. Neo agrees to take her to Joburg so she can do something with her father’s ashes. The road trip is the clumsy backdrop to their clumsy relationship. It squeezes in flashbacks, brings up old hurts and resentments, introduces a few South African stereotypes, and shots of a vague, rural South Africa.
Ella has a lot of emotional baggage to get through. She had been forced to look after her alcoholic father after being abandoned by her mother. She is a waitress at an unusually busy (for Beaufort West) cafeteria. Her relationship is introduced to us in a few messages left on an unanswered phone. There’s not much going on for her except misery. And then she is also dikbek and sulky with her godfather. We discover the reason for this in fits and starts. None of it makes fluent sense and the emotional jumps and mood swings happen mid-sentence and without explanation. Much like the flashbacks. I didn’t know what was before or after for quite a while.
The storyline is weak and improbable, and the script does nothing to improve it. Scene choices are unoriginal, and the dialogue is unrealistic at best and really horrible at crucial moments.
The performances
With Sello Maake Ka-Ncube as one of the leads there was the expectation that it wouldn’t be all terrible. But it was. He was slow and awkward and seemed seriously uncomfortable with the unnatural dialogue and forced conversation. But most horrible in his performance was the unrealistic trumpet playing scene where the notes are all over the place and his fingers are still. (I also heard quite a lot of extra foleys of trumpet key clicking without the accompanying finger movements. Weird.)
Jade Anstey doesn’t fare much better. Ella is such an uninteresting character that all the emotional slides from tears to laughter and then back to sad sulks are just irritating. She is so thoroughly unexciting my mind kept wandering until it fixed on the fact that I had seen her in another movie, where her character had had a relationship with another aging alcoholic, also played by Lionel Newton. This time around he is her much sicker, and then dead, father.
The smaller parts are as unconvincing. Rose is played by gorgeous Katlego Danke, but her age is so wrong for the character she looks like a contemporary of Ella’s as opposed to someone her mother’s age. Awkward. Then poor Michelle Douglas has to play the terrible stereotype of the Afrikaans B&B owner with accompanying accent but in English. Ouch.
Lots of driving. Lots of talking and fighting. An establishing shot of Kimberly’s big hole. An establishing shot of a sign on the road reading Gauteng. Otherwise we really would have no idea where we are. It is so confusing.
Drinking, drinking, drinking …
There is a weird, uncomfortable night-swimming scene, a terrible drunk sex-in-a-toilet scene, a strange philosophical lying-on-the-grass-at-night scene, a hideously scripted scene at a gravestone, a gross death/vomit scene, and the incomprehensible burying of ashes in someone else’s garden in Joburg (even though the connection to Joburg is never actually made). Oh and then there is the drinking, references to drinking, actual drinking and attitudes to drinking – with the heavy handedness of a sledgehammer. All this to a rambling and ill-matched jazz soundtrack.
This movie needs to find its place as a learning experiment for a young screenplay writer and director, but it is going to do her no favours as a serious contender in the mainstream South African movie industry.
What: Farewell Ella Bella
Where and when: In South African cinemas from 17 August 2018
WS
