Heart of the Highveld

| Friday February 26, 2010 00:00

Comedy that grows from character, rather than being a string of jokes insulated from any feel of real life, is hard to come by in South Africa, and Jozi should be enjoyed for that -- as well as for its heart, its quirky emotional centre and its take on this great and awful city on the Highveld.

Carl Beukes takes the lead, playing a TV writer burning himself out on heaps of cocaine, desperately trying to get his mojo back but only making it worse with each snort. He's behaving extremely erratically when his friends make an 'intervention' and he finds himself in rehab in a rather unpleasant rural kind of religious concentration camp. From there, he must find his way back to some kind of normalcy.

As a friend he made in rehab (played by Lionel Newton) joins him unexpectedly in Jo'burg, and he gets a job writing for an empty-headed sitcom, the troubles in his life seem to be getting worse -- but then that's the nature of comedy. And it won't be much of a spoiler to say that things turn out, more-or-less, okay in the end.

Jozi is not a big-budget film that is going to pop the eyes of the Avatards, but it has more of a human centre, and more to laugh at and feel good about, than the bulk of the Hollywood product we're fed all the time. It certainly has more to say to South Africans.

Written and directed by Craig Freimond, it was a quick shoot that drew on the talents of a large array of South Africa's most famous faces of stage and screen, who keep popping up unexpectedly.

For Beukes, 'It was intense work. We shot for four weeks, on set 24/7, in the middle of winter. But it was the best fun I've ever had in my life.'

Those famous faces acted as a support base: 'As the lead you are supposed to lead the cast. But I was led from beginning to end, because with someone like Lionel next to you, you don't even have to try.'

Part of the enjoyment for Beukes, he says, was that 'Craig is one of the funniest men in the world. We were always laughing. There was never any sign of negativity. A good, flowing shoot. Everyone was enjoying themselves.'

Well, perhaps Freimond wasn't enjoying himself quite as much as it seemed to his cast, though he clearly didn't hate the process. He's thoughtful about filmmaking as opposed to the theatre. Gums and Noses began as a play, but Jozi was written especially for the screen.

'I'm about to go and do a play, which I haven't done for about five years,' he says, relishing the thought of getting into the minutiae of creating a piece with the actors in that special theatrical space. 'I struggle directing film. I find it a very difficult process. What I like doing is working with actors, revealing the thing through the actors, and what happens with film is that the amount of time that you get, the space that you get, is really limited. You've got 20 people going on at you, schedules, helicopters, walkie-talkies  'Now we're doing lunch ..' There's such a sprawl that trying to remain focused on what you're trying to do is tremendously hard.'

But it clearly came together. Jozi maintains its level of pace and humour all the way through and it works at a deeper-than-superficial level because the humour comes out of the characters and the weird situations in which they find themselves. If American filmmakers can define a category of film other than the big plot-driven, effects-laded blockbuster and call it 'character-driven' drama, then Jozi is an example of character-based humour.

Freimond wants to make something other than the kind of comedy that he, in fact, parodies in the film, in the form of the very simplistic show for which the protagonist tries to write. It's all formulaic jokes and join-the-dots characters in a barely three-dimensional set. Transport those quasi-characters into a real-life situation in a real city (and not even some of the horrors Johannesburgers can be subjected to) and they would simply be baffled, unable to understand the basics of urban survival.

The comedy of Jozi is comedy that, as Freimond puts it, is 'a little bit off-centre -- it's got an honesty to it'. The aim is 'finding the uniqueness of a relationship and really going in on it. When we did Sorted, I found we were getting into something because we could tap into who people are.'

Explaining the title that the movie shares with the city, there is a dimension of the film that emerges gently and slowly as the film progresses: it's not just about the relationships of the central character to the people around him (and Nick Boraine is given a delightfully contrasting part, for one), but about the relationship of one person to the city in which he lives. As Freimond says: 'I guess, in a way, we wanted to make a love story about a city that everyone loves to hate.' (Mail & Guardian)