Skoonheid

Oliver Hermanus (2011)

As François van Heerden, the Bloemfontein businessman who is the main character in Beauty, Deon Lotz is the embodiment of my idea of a middle-aged Afrikaner – big, burly, unsmiling.  (Vestigial anti-white South African prejudice makes me suppose it was the end of apartheid that wiped the smile off his face.)  François is a man’s man in more ways than one:  he’s homosexual.  The first scene of the movie, which Oliver Hermanus wrote as well as directed, takes place at François’s daughter’s wedding but the bride’s father’s gaze is fixed not on his daughter but on her friend Christian – conspicuously so.   The sequence is a bad case of A Single Man syndrome – unless François is invisible to his guests how can they not notice?  I know I always make this point but, when a drama depends on the discrepancy between what’s going on inside a character’s head and his appearance to the world outside his head, it’s critical for the actor and director to convey this distinction – to make the audience aware of what the other people on screen don’t see.  Because it’s so immediately obvious that François has his eye on Christian, I was immediately doubtful about Beauty.  I’d completely lost confidence in Oliver Hermanus before the film was much older.

That opening announces too soon and obviously what’s on François’s mind but, in case we were in any doubt about his sexual feelings, Hermanus also soon shows us that he doesn’t touch his wife in bed.  We can see from her shrivelled, melancholic mien that she knows how things are – even if she doesn’t know how her husband gets what he needs sexually.  He drives into the country and arrives at a farm where he and a group of other men drink beer together and swap gay porn videos.  These play in the background as the men have sex with each other.  (It’s typical of Beauty that they have sex and watch porn at the same time.)  Like François, the other men in this group are married and/or apparently straight:  the house rules include ‘no faggots, no coloureds’.  Since François indulges in homosexual sex purely in order to satisfy his physical urges, it seems surprising that he falls madly in love with Christian.  We’re meant to think that the latter’s devastating ‘beauty’ explodes the well-established routines of François’s secret sexuality but I never could believe this.  Charlie Keegan, who plays Christian, has pretty boy good looks.  Christian is training to be a lawyer but he’s also a male model in television commercials.  At the wedding we see him working his good looks – his manner is flirty and borderline camp, and Hermanus never addresses the question of how this conflicts with the macho imperatives of François’s sexual lifestyle.  (Although he’s the son of one of François’s oldest friends, Christian arrives as a bolt from the blue.  I didn’t understand why it seems François hadn’t seen him since he was a child – especially in view of Christian’s minor celebrity.)   The motor of the story, and what’s supposed to be moving about it, is that François finds himself attracted to another man in what, for him, is an unprecedented way.  Yet, when he brutally rapes Christian, you don’t feel this is François’s only option after serious attempts at intimacy of a physically less explicit kind have failed.  François reverts to his usual practice of aggressive, loveless sex pretty quickly.

Oliver Hermanus puts into one character different tropes from stories about repressed or concealed homosexual natures and doesn’t work them into a persuasive combination.  The only interesting idea in the movie is the linking of unacceptable sexual preferences with racial views that were conventional under the apartheid regime but which have become relatively marginalised in twenty-first century South Africa.  Hermanus doesn’t follow this through either, though.  The film’s bleak final shot – as François drives his car into a spiralling underpass – is expressive of his situation at the start of Beauty but takes no account of what he’s done to Christian.  It’s not clear either how François can be sure Christian isn’t going to tell others what happened – especially since one of Hermanus’s main points seems to be that Christian is part of an utterly different generation, and easy in his sexual ambiguity in a way that’s impossible for a man like François.  By the end of the film, it seems right that it opened with Deon Lotz’s eyes; although they’re a giveaway in that moment, they are the heart of Beauty.  You can’t take your eyes off Lotz either.  There in what seems like nearly every frame, he gives a highly committed performance, even if the pressure that it generates seems to derive from François’s unhappy circumstances as much as from the actor’s force.

25 April 2012