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Oliver Hermanus’
Moffie opens with an uneasy send-off dinner, followed soon after by a veritable descent into hell. The setting is South Africa in 1981, and 18-year-old Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), like all other white boys over 16, is being conscripted for military service and a tour on the Angolan border, ostensibly to fend off communist terrorists. After a snaking train passage shot through with mounting terror, he soon finds himself in the darkness of a boot camp, under the thumb of Sergeant Brand (Hilton Pelser), an all-too-believable sadist who takes perverse pleasure in whipping the conscripts into shape. Beyond the usual horrors and humiliations of basic training, Nicholas also has to deal with the fact that, despite his last name (inherited from his stepfather), he is English among predominantly Afrikaans peers, and therefore has to fend off their taunts as well as Brand’s. Add to all this his hinted-at homosexuality, and
Basic Training Proves Anything-But-Basic In The Powerful South African Drama Moffie
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Basic Training Proves Anything-But-Basic In The Powerful South African Drama Moffie
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Basic Training Proves Anything-But-Basic In The Powerful South African Drama Moffie
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Cary Darling April 5, 2021Updated: April 5, 2021, 11:30 am
Kai Luke Brummer as Nicholas in Oliver Hermanus’ “Moffie.” Photo: IFC Films
“Moffie,” a derogatory Afrikaans term for “gay,” is dismissive shorthand for everything that the young men in the harrowing film of the same name, from South African director Oliver Hermanus, don’t want to be. Set amid a group of freshly arrived white army conscripts who will be sent to fight communist guerrillas along the Angolan border in apartheid-era South Africa, it’s a riveting portrait of a particular time and place while also being a broader assault on the type of pressure-cooker masculinity where torture, cruelty, humiliation and racism are the coins of the realm.