Inxeba  

John Trengove (2017)

Xolani (Nakhani Touré) is a factory worker in Queenstown, a town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province.  He always takes his annual leave to participate in the initiation rituals for young men of the Xhosa community to which he belongs.   Xolani is one of the mentors to these initiates.  After being circumcised at the start of the programme, known as ulwaluko, they and their ‘caregivers’, as the mentors are called, remain in seclusion for the next few weeks, while the penis wounds heal.  During this time, the youths are required to complete various tests of physical ability and nerve in a mountain area of the Eastern Cape, where the retreat is based.  By the end of the process, they are qualified for official Xhosa manhood and attendant privileges (such as attending tribal meetings).  As Adams Mars-Jones notes in his TLS review of The Wound, it’s not uncommon for a film to be described as a ‘coming of age’ or ‘rite of passage’ story but John Trengove’s drama merits this label to an unusual degree.

Xolani’s charge at the latest ulwaluko is different from the other initiates.  Whereas they, like Xolani, come from rural working families, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini) is middle-class and lives in Johannesburg.  Explaining that he’s a mother’s boy and too fond of home comforts, Kwanda’s father instructs Xolani to be hard on his son in the coming weeks.   It’s plain to see that Kwanda is not only stigmatised by his fellow initiates, who see him as enfeebled by privilege, but almost keen to isolate himself from the group.  The two things are intertwined:  while the rest of the boys go barefoot, Kwanda insists on wearing his trainers.  There’s a blurring also between the other youngsters’ perception of him as a pampered softie and as queer.  His caregiver has particular reason to be alert to the matter of Kwanda’s sexuality:  Xolani himself is gay, though not openly so.  This becomes clear shortly after the arrival at the camp of another of the mentors, Vija (Bongile Mantsai), his friend since boyhood.   A self-confident extrovert, now a husband and father, Vija is the polar opposite of reticent, solitary Xolani but the two men are soon having furtive sex together.  It emerges that Vija is the sole reason for Xolani’s annual return to the ulwaluko programme.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is casting a long shadow (and a wide geographical net) over screen stories of gay lives.  John Trengove’s immediate inspiration was an African novel about Xhosa initiation, A Man Who is Not a Man by Thando Mgqolozana, but the Brokeback connections in The Wound, written by Trengove with Mgqolozana and Malusi Bengu, are as hard to ignore as they were in God’s Own Country.   Aspects of both Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist resonate in Xolani.   Like both of them, he lives for the short time each year that he can spend with the man he loves.   Like Ennis (once his marriage has collapsed), though unlike Jack, Xolani is celibate the rest of the time.  In the famous ‘I wish I could quit you’ scene, Jack rails at Ennis that ‘what we got now is Brokeback Mountain … Everything’s built on that … That’s all we got, boy, fuckin’ all’.  On one of the rather few occasions that Xolani speaks his mind, he says, ‘There’s only the mountain for me and it’s not enough’.

That remark is addressed to Kwanda rather than Vija:  a significant difference between Trengove’s film and the Lee-directed ones is that The Wound has three important gay (or bisexual) characters.  Kwanda intuits that Xolani is a closet gay and deplores his inability to come out.  He also derides Xolani’s fond hope that the depth of his attachment to Vija is reciprocated.  Kwanda isn’t wrong about that, another major departure from the set-ups of Brokeback Mountain and God’s Own Country.  Xolani not only abstains from sex during the rest of the year.  He also saves money to give to Vija.  The latter has a family to support on meagre rural wages; Xolani has no such responsibilities and earns relatively well in Queenstown.  The payment to Vija can’t in effect, though, be simply altruistic.  Xolani, whether consciously or not, is trying to buy a kind of allegiance.  For Vija, the cash is welcome but he’s uncomfortable about being paid for sex.  He accepts the money even so but then, after Xolani talks about needing more from their relationship, hands it back.  Vija is fond of Xolani, evidently enjoys having sex with him but seems to see this as a strictly circumscribed part of his annual men-only getaway.  Vija will return to his straight life when the holiday is over.

Although he stands out among the caregivers as unblokeish (and seemingly younger than his peers), Nakhani Touré’s fine performance makes it easy to believe that Xolani has managed to conceal his sexuality by keeping his head down on the tribal retreats.  Touré’s face is expressive in ways that wouldn’t draw the attention of others, especially in a group that takes it for granted that all its members are heterosexual.   What the characters see and don’t see in The Wound is convincing:  Kwanda picks up his mentor’s feelings for Vija; other initiates come to suspect Xolani’s sexuality because he’s quietly sympathetic towards the ‘fag’ Kwanda.  John Trengove’s direction charges descriptions of ritual with more than documentary interest.  There’s a startling comedy in the briskness with which the doctor carries out the circumcisions and instructs each boy to shout, in response to the cut, ‘I am a man!’ – the words intended to be, as well as self-assertive, a momentary analgesic.  Trengove gives ulwaluko its due as an affirmation of cultural identity and as a bonding agent but doesn’t ignore its benighted aspects.  Once the initiates have attained manhood and just before they rejoin their families, an elder offers a prayer that the new tribal members avoid the corruptions of white culture and urban life.

Kwanda is not among the graduates.  When the concluding ceremony takes place, he has gone missing and Xolani is supposedly looking for him.  In fact, the two of them are together, making their way, along a mountain route, in the direction of a highway back to Johannesburg.   In the course of the story, Kwanda has become increasingly forthright.    In comparing their circumcised cocks, the other boys exclude him:  Kwanda’s orientation would bring a worrying homosexual tincture to their homosocial fun.  His withering reaction – ‘Why are you so interested in each other’s dicks?’ – may be a case of attack as the best means of defence.  But in his last conversations with the troubled, frightened Xolani, Kwanda delivers an angrily assured diatribe against macho tribalism and homophobia.  Throughout the initiation rites, the young men have worn a whitening body paint.  Without this make-up and dressed again in clothes in which he’s comfortable, Niza Jay Ncoyini’s Kwanda is a newly formidable presence and this increases the impact of Xolani’s final act.  He pushes Kwanda off a mountain ledge – a moment all the more appalling because, though we don’t see the fallen Kwanda, we can hear what are presumably his dying breaths from below.  The film’s last shot shows Xolani sitting in the back of the truck on which he’s hitched a lift, presumably bound for Queenstown.  Did Xolani intend to accompany Kwanda on a journey into modern metropolitan ‘freedom’ but panic at the eleventh hour?  Or was he always intending to silence the younger man and waiting for the right moment?  Either way, the conclusion of The Wound is troubling testament to Xolani’s inability to change his ways enough to realise fully his sexuality.

John Trengove tends increasingly towards scenes that are immediately compelling  but aren’t followed up or lack credibility within the strongly realistic context developed in what’s gone before.   A white farmer allows Xolani, Vija and a group of initiates onto his land so they can get a good view of a waterfall, one of the area’s outstanding features.  Vija then steals one of the farmer’s goats – purely, it seems, in order to pressure Kwanda into a rare moment of conventional manhood by slitting the animal’s throat.  The consequences – both of abusing the farmer’s goodwill and in terms of Xolani’s reaction – are ignored.   Vija and Xolani eventually make love amid verdure below the waterfall – a quasi-paradisal setting – and fall asleep there, their naked bodies entwined.  Kwanda appears on the scene; ashamed and flustered, they hurriedly dress.  It makes symbolic sense that Kwanda discovers them and the more extended lovemaking is emotionally effective – it comes as a relief after their earlier quickies.  Yet it’s hard to credit, given what we’ve come to know about the two men, that Xolani and Vika would take the risk of post-coital sleep together.  In the final part of the film, the tribal elders are strikingly unconcerned by Kwanda’s disappearance.  Perhaps this is intended as a comment on their anti-urban prejudice but you can’t help suspecting this is another instance of Trengove’s change of emphasis.

The waterfall is the first thing we see in The Wound, its location and significance at that stage unclear.   Trengove then cuts to Xolani in his fork-lift truck at the factory before moving to the training camp locale where all the subsequent action takes place.  The mountain cataract in The Wound brings to mind the one shown briefly in the closing stages of another 2017 gay love story, Call Me by Your Name.  Trengove’s waterfall is a recurring and richer image, though, and his film as a whole a more urgent drama of queer identity than Luca Guadagnino’s.   Although it falters somewhat in the closing stages, The Wound is powerful and tragic.

10 May 2018