Moffie: The heart of our darkness

Men who have fought in wars don’t really talk about it. And when they do, things might turn violent quickly. It is best to move away, as it is a sign that some of the violence they’ve absorbed, had to participate in, and enact, is trying to escape.

Which is why it is critical for such men (and it is generally men) to have a slow and secure release valve. Such as a psychologist’s office. Of course this rarely happens, so we live among traumatised people who struggle to contain their demons, and find a variety of generally destructive ways to do so.

For thirteen years all white boys were ground through a malicious, intentionally cruel and brutal system designed to break them down and strip them of their voice in order to enable them to kill as a matter of survival. This is true of all young men who have been drafted into wars, just this one is close to home. Very close.

Moffie is a particular rendering of a time and place. The South African Infantry School, 1981, and the border, 1982. It gets it right.

The silence that exists between characters is its genius. The army shuts you up. Shuts you in. To talk about how you feel is impossible. What matters can only be said in silence. There is a fair amount of monologue, spat in the form of abuse by Hilton Pelser’s psychopathic Sergeant Brand, overflowing with ‘fokken roofies’ and ‘etters’ and ‘puisiepoes’ but actual dialogue is minimal. The familiarity of this inability to speak is where everything begins to teeter toward the edge of the world.

“Ek voel vokol” is the password to acceptance. Feeling nothing, or pretending to, is a solace and a weapon.

And so we see how these battered, brutalised boys, young men full of physicality and half-formed realisations, express what they feel, if they dare to do so at all, without words, or under cover of bravado.

Communication becomes implicit. It is the length of silences; the leaning of heads; the terse enquiry: “you allright?”; the shy joining in half-singing the words of a song with your chommie as you clean rifle parts for inspection. Simply sitting next to someone holds meaning.

Director Oliver Hermanus achieves this through portraits and close ups and landscape and tableaux. It is grimy, dark, and beautiful. Actor Kei-Luke Brummer, who is our protagonist van der Swart – a soutpiel with an Afrikaans surname – is beautiful. And what happens around him, and to him and everyone else, is awful.

To a certain generation of South African white men who watch this film, it will reach into rooms in the mind that were firmly shut. Everyone who got conscripted into browns will be deeply affected, no matter how much they deny it or pretend not to be. The madness. The insanity. And for some – far too many – the horror. And yes, we are talking about The Heart of Darkness. It is all there, with very few shots fired.

It is a great film. The cinematography is brooding, although the aesthetic may be a little indulgent. It could have focused a bit less on Brummer and given us a better look at Stassen, or Sachs, his fellow troep. Played by Matthew Vey who has a bit of a James Phillips look about him, Sachs is an intriguing and complex character. There is dangerously close to too much focus on Brummer, as well as he stands up under scrutiny. But then it is based on an autobiography, by Andre Carl van der Merwe.

The strength of Moffie is that it is not about the SADF and the early ‘80s border war. That is merely the specific setting. And neither, in my reading, is it about being homosexual or coming to terms with it, but about the internal conflict of having to do things you don’t want to do, and not being able to do the things you do want to do.

That is something with which we are all familiar, this is just extreme circumstances.

The film is available for streaming. Tickets cost R150. Fine it at https://www.moffiefilm.com/stream