[star rating=”4″] FIVE FINGERS FOR MARSEILLES. Directed by Michael Matthews. Written by Sean Drummond. With Zethu Dlomo, Vuyo Dabula, Kenneth Nkosi and Jerry Mofokeng.
MEGAN FURNISS reviews
When the opening shot of Five Fingers for Marseilles reveals the South African grassland with its accompanying wind, the filmmakers locate you immediately in a space both familiar and emotional. That is the best part of watching a local movie; it is already shaped by you and your knowledge of place, sound, language, custom.
I forgot that I was in a quiet, midweek afternoon movie house at the V&A Waterfront, and submitted to the rugged landscape of a fictional, rural South Africa and its typical, old style white village, Marseilles, with township, called Railway, on the hill.
Five very unusual boys set the scene; rural kids and their katties, their gang badges made from wood and pegs, their clubhouse a cave. These are black, Sotho speaking children in an eighties African version of Stand By Me, or Stranger Things – Stephen King and Spielberg are hauntingly present. Tau, the fierce uncontained lion, his brother and the band’s leader Zulu, Pastor the gentle storyteller, Pockets the rich kid, and Cockroach, make up the five fingers, and they are joined by the girl, Lerato.
Rugged landscape and buckets of blood
The inhabitants of the tiny township are harassed and victimised by white, apartheid policemen who are pelted by the kids with eggs and stones. The perfect brown police uniforms and terrifying yellow police van describe the time perfectly. Then things go horribly wrong for the children in a disastrous event that changes their lives forever.
Fast forward to the present, and Tau (Vuyo Dabula), after serving time in prison, returns to Marseilles to find that Railway, and the town itself are still victimised, only the bullies and thugs are new ones. Far from the freedom that was promised, the town is now terrorised by a gang of outlaws led by Ghost (Hamilton Dlamini). Tau’s brother is dead, Pockets (Kenneth Nkosi) is the corrupt mayor of Marseilles, Cockroach (Mduduzi Mabaso) is a corrupt police chief, and Pastor (Aubrey Poolo) has lost his faith. The tension between what was, and what has become is the glue that sticks and unsticks the story, right until its gory, desperate conclusion.
The rugged landscape, the reimagining of traditional Western tropes, brilliant styling and cinematography, violence and buckets of blood, all pay tribute to the genre the movie is inspired by, but this is not only a Western; it is deeply original, haunting, chilling and compelling film.
One of the things I absolutely loved was the strange and heightened sound; background voices crowding the scenes in an unnerving way.
Size and scope
But this movie isn’t completely without its flaws. It is agonisingly slow. I know that this is one of the genre’s styles to build and create tension, but it just takes too long; too long for characters to speak, and too long for most of them to say things. The story is convoluted to begin with, and sometimes it becomes a little incomprehensible, which is a problem of scene choice – how to tell the story, as well as in the directing and editing. The ending suffers here, with a lack of clarity around who does what to who.
The children and the leads are phenomenal, particularly Vuyo Dabula, Kenneth Nkosi and Lizwi Vilakazi (as Sizwe), but strange casting choices, particularly of Honest John (Dean Fourie) and Congo (Warren Masemola) are awkward and jarring, especially since they play the one white guy and second foreigner.
I loved watching a feature in Sesotho, with smatterings of isiXhosa and English, and two or three Afrikaans swearwords. I loved the strangeness of the snowy, rugged and totally familiar landscape, the styling, the marriage of deeply rural, bleak South Africa seen through the bleak lens of a Western. I loved the size and scope of this film, which must be seen on a big screen.
Five Fingers for Marseilles is the kind of movie I am excited to see being made at home.
What: Five Fingers for Marseilles
Where: Ster-Kinekor cinemas
WS
