Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

This is another one of those movies where the title gets mentioned in passing but nobody really feels the need to talk about what it’s about. Eventually I got curious enough to track down a synopsis that satisfied me that it’s about an uncontacted tribesman coming into contact with the modernized world and finding “civilization” to be a confusing mess.

It also seems to have the kind of reputation you’d expect a movie made in the late 70s by white people about native Africans to have in terms of stereotyping.

After watching the movie:

On the plains of the Kalahari, tribes of “bushmen” live very contented, insular lives. They can go for years without seeing another family and hardly any have seen anyone from the industrialized societies only a few hundred miles away. One day a careless airplane pilot drops an empty Coca-Cola bottle out the window of his airplane and it lands directly in front of a man named Xi, who assumes this strange object is a gift from the gods and brings it back to his family. It turns out to have a variety of uses, but as there is only one of the Thing and everyone wants to use it but they’ve never had to deal with scarcity before, disharmony soon develops, caused by the Evil Thing. Xi decides that he must return the Evil Thing to the gods or throw it off the edge of the world, and sets out walking. Meanwhile, Dr. Andrew Steyn, a biologist doing field research on wildlife manure, is asked to take his barely functioning land rover to go pick up Miss Kate Thompson, a former Johannesburg journalist who has come to teach at the village school. Steyn is a useless bundle of nerves around women and the two have a thoroughly miserable time thanks to the land rover, which ultimately stalls out in the river, forcing them to camp overnight. Also, guerilla leader Sam Boga’s men raid a cabinet meeting in an attempt on the president’s life, but the president survives and orders Boga’s gang stopped at all cost. Xi comes across a herd of goats and kills one for food, but the boy watching the herd has him arrested for stealing the goat, a crime Xi has no concept of. Steyn’s mechanic M’pudi is called into court as an interpreter, and Steyn and M’pudi, certain that the three month prison sentence will kill Xi, arrange to employ him as a tracker on work release. Sam Boga, now on the run, comes across Miss Thompson’s school and takes the entire class hostage while they flee into the next country.

I selected this as part of the mockumentary series because it appeared on at least one list of mockumentaries, but it really isn’t. Apparently the writer-director is a nature documentarian and had the idea while making a nature documentary, and for a while at the beginning I could believe it was a spoof of a nature doc, but as the story develops, it settles into a more traditional narrative structure, especially when we’re with the Westerners and don’t need the narrator to explain what’s happening. Wikipedia’s lax definitions have struck again, and I didn’t have time to select a different movie by the time I realized it’s a bad categorization.

On its own, I wasn’t sure where any particularly harmful stereotypes were involved. Xi and his people seem to be fairly well respected by the story, and the movie seems to be presenting them as having the right idea. The complexity of the modernized world has spiraled out of control and everyone needs to be locked into a school for over fifteen years in order to be able to understand it all. The way that Xi understands what he’s seeing, as shared with us by the narrator, is very reasonable for his perspective and I thought the white people were the butt of the joke when there’s a cultural disconnect. At worst, everyone who’s sympathetic to Xi treats him kind of patronizingly in a way they’re not really called out on, but Xi seems to prove himself intelligent, resourceful, and strong-willed, and the patronizers are better than the unfair legal system that doesn’t do any more to accommodate him than hire a translator.

However, it seems that the reality of the San people Xi’s tribe is based on is much different from the idyllic stereotype fantasy in the movie, as colonization encroached on them much the same way that American colonization encroached the First Peoples here. They do not live too far away to encounter the rest of the world, they are compressed into much too small a space and as such mostly live in actual poverty, dependent on whatever way they can make money. Also those much more conversant with apartheid issues than me have argued that the plot doesn’t just ignore apartheid, but the guerillas reinforce apartheid beliefs by coming in from outside the country to cause the only political strife we see, and are also defeated in an absurdly easy manner.

Also, Xi may be the catalyst for a lot of what happens, but the real protagonist once everything comes together is Steyn. For a movie about what an indigenous African with no concept of colonized society thinks of our world, there sure is a lot of focus on the white couple having an extended meet cute. I always thought it was about him coming to the city, but Xi doesn’t need to go anywhere near the city to meet another culture, because of how colonized African villages are.

On a technical level, I was going to complain about how some scenes are really obviously dubbed and wonder why they couldn’t record the sound on-site in some cases but not others, and then I found out that the original South African release was as much in Afrikaans as in English, but the Afrikaans was dubbed for the American release. There’s also a lot of times that the film speed is played with for comedic effect that I wasn’t as amused by as it seems I was supposed to be.

This movie feels like it was made in the late 60s or early 70s, but was actually released in 1980. The plot seems a bit simple for late 70s, but maybe that’s because it was made by a nature documentarian. It feels like it’s reaching for satire, but ultimately it’s just a silly little story that’s based on some incorrect concepts. I would’ve liked to see it go harder on mocking Western society and do less patronizing, but it’s a product of a South African man in the 70s, so it’s as limited by his own worldview as Xi’s understanding of the “gods” is.