Flatland (Jenna Cato Bass, 2019)

After fleeing her abusive spouse, young woman Nathalie (Nicole Fortuin) goes on the run with her horse and her heavily pregnant best friend Poppie (Izel Bezuidenhout).

Their escape leads them to cross paths with veteran cop Beauty Cuba (Faith Baloyi), who finds herself personally motivated to track down the pair.

After three years away, the New Zealand African Film Festival is back. I was not able to see a lot of the selections, so this will be a one-off.

Divided between the perspectives of the pursued and the pursuer, Jenna Cato Bass’s film shares elements of various genres, while telling a story about what it means to be a woman in South Africa, particularly in this corner of the country.

Nathalie and Poppie’s journey resembles a road movie with the visual signifiers of a western, as they go from sharing a horse to hitching a ride with Poppie’s dubious male friend Branko (Clayton Everston).

Most of this section takes place in the Karoo desert, an endless flat plain that is barely glimpsed in this intimate drama. Despite the expanse, the film is constantly isolating and limiting the characters through the camera’s framing, cutting them off from any concrete destination or a future outside the conservative, hypocritical world they know.

Complementing this storyline is Beauty Cuba’s, a deadpan detective story with a tragic underbelly.

Faith Baloyi’s Beauty is a fascinating character. Like the movie, it is a multifaceted performance - as a cop, she is a sphinx, picking up clues and sniffing out Bakkis’s (De Klerk Oelofse) guilt almost immediately.

 

A fine investigator who constantly has to use her own initiative to get around the prejudice of the people around her, she is willing to throw it all away for love. 

And while she is dedicated to her work, Beauty is equally obsessed with a TV soap opera that she watches religiously every day - to the point of pulling her gun on some bar patrons who refuse her request to change the channel.

 

The melodrama of that genre is a distillation of the struggles and contradictions of the characters.

Whereas the soap centres a male protagonist tormented by his wife’s infidelity, the three women reflect the opposite: Nathalie flees her husband after he assaults her on their wedding night; Poppie is pregnant, expelled from school and imprisoned by her family for being ‘loose’; Beauty is haunted by her love for her fiancé, Billy (Brendon Daniels), who she arrested after he drunkenly killed his brother for insulting her.

While the film is unflinching in showing the dark side of the characters’ lives - the women are constantly in danger, whether through racism or misogyny - the movie also has a dry sense of humour, particularly the interplay between Beauty and the other characters. 

At 117 minutes, it does not feel bloated, and the intersecting paths of the central characters allows the film to refine and hone its focus on its central themes - including the nuances of colourism that affect Beauty and Nathalie in markedly different ways.

An intriguing drama, Flatland is worth a look. At the very least, it is worth going into as the first episode in the adventures of Beauty Cuba, a detective worthy of her own franchise.