Opinion

'Moffie': A gritty 'Full Metal Jacket'-type film

Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is a 16-year-old trying to serve out his two years of compulsory military service in 1981 South Africa without revealing his true nature in Oliver Hermanus’ military drama “Moffie.”
Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is a 16-year-old trying to serve out his two years of compulsory military service in 1981 South Africa without revealing his true nature in Oliver Hermanus’ military drama “Moffie.”

As some of you might know, I used to be a civilian subcontractor for the United States Marine Corps. I worked along several folks who used the same profane language that real life drill instructor R. Lee Ermey bellowed at conscripts in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket." Some of my co-workers even had talking dolls of Ermey that replayed his NC-17 insults.

Despite that, the Apartheid-era drill instructors and soldiers in the new South African movie "Moffie" scare me. There is a sadism there to make Ermey seem softhearted.

Last week, when I asked co-screenwriter-director Oliver Hermanus why I felt so uncomfortable, he replied by Zoom from London, "The South African military under Apartheid took their reference from much darker forces. That's a reference to the Nazis to be honest. The language that they use and the nature of the language was kind of out of control."

Much of the film's dialogue is in Afrikaans, the language adopted from Dutch settlers in the 17th century. The derision and abuse sound meaner even if you don't grasp the words.

"Afrikaans is a flavorful language," Hermanus explains, "so the descriptions drip a little bit more with aggressive undertones. I always found it difficult to translate because in the English translation there was like a 20% loss in the dirt of the dialogue and in the aggression of the dialogue."

The story takes on an additionally unsettling tone because the era is viewed from the point of view of a draftee named Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer). He's already viewed with some contempt because his heritage is British.

"Although like a lot of South Africans, he doesn't really speak it, but they can understand it. I'm not very confident in speaking it. There was a lot of tension between the Dutch Afrikaans speakers and the English speakers. For him, there's an extra level of terror because they are speaking a different language, and what they're saying is terrorizing in itself," Hermanus said.

Nicholas is also trying to hide the fact that he's gay from the other draftees. "Moffie" is an Afrikaans anti-LGBT slur. If his peers or his superiors find out, he could experience persecution like the kind that Black residents of the country experienced at the time. In one sequence, recruits harass a Black man for simply sitting on a railway bench.

"What I wanted to demonstrate was the powerlessness of Black people and how exposed they were to humiliation and victimization," Hermanus said. "They don't physically beat him up. It's darker because it's worse in its disregard for his humanity in a way."

"Moffie," which is based on Andre Carl van der Merwe's novel, also unflinchingly depicts the toll that the stress of the 1981 war in Angola and basic training took on soldiers like Nicholas. Both "Moffie" and "Full Metal Jacket" depict draftees breaking down with tragic results.

Whereas Kubrick jolted audiences with quick, powerful cutting, Hermanus depicts a meltdown in a long, wide shot that's as shocking in its own right. Without the editing, the impact seems even more horrific, but all the background artists have to react appropriately, and the special effects must work flawlessly.

"That was definitely a technical challenge. It's very difficult when you have a special effects element at the end of a long scene. You've got all these other things going on, and they happen in real time," Hermanus said.

"What was very useful was that the first take of that scene, I had an armorer who was directed to shoot a live round of ammunition at that exact moment, and every single actor's heart stopped because of the sound. You can see it in the film. They all dropped to the ground in absolute horror."

Speaking of horror, the experience in the war took its toll on the generation that preceded Hermanus' own. He was born two years after his movie takes place. Making the film has helped him understand the people who grew up when his parents did.

"I think this has a huge impact to them. You actually notice it more now than I did before. There were a lot of people that I know. They keep their hair very short. They have a sort of very pausing way of doing things. I never picked up on this undertone with a lot of men of this generation who were part of my own life. I've now started to see patterns because it's not the kind of experience you can kind of just expunge. It becomes part of you. They were so young at the time," Hermanus said.

"Moffie" would probably not have done well at international festivals or earned a BAFTA nomination if it were all doom and gloom. Nicholas experiences a sort of sexual awaking and a sense of euphoria that comes only from young love. The only other depiction I had seen that was similar occurred in Barry Jenkins' "If Beale Street Could Talk."

Hermanus admitted, "The element that was most challenging was to find a way of having a sexual awakening be framed as an internal kind of beauty and a tonal moment of light. Despite the context, I wanted this particular scene where I've got this kind of opera playing where you're living inside his head for a minute. He feels different, and something has changed. I wanted this experience to exist for Nicholas even though he was in this environment where if anyone knew what was going on inside his head, it would be kind of the end of his life in a way."

Like Gavin Hood ("Tsotsi," "Official Secrets"), Hermanus' movies have found audiences outside of South Africa. Hermanus adds, "I think there's a younger generation of filmmakers who are making work that is a lot bolder and edgier and less afraid of being liked." The director himself says that he prefers films that go for the jugular.

From looking at his Twitter feed, it was obvious he didn't mind having his own films compared to Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" or "A Clockwork Orange," which also made extensive use of classical compositions. When I nervously brought up the seemingly inevitable comparison, Hermanus laughed and said, "I think everyone is a Kubrick fan."

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