Moffie ***** (2019, Kai Luke Brummer, Ryan de Villiers, Matthew Vey) – Movie Review

Oliver Hermanus’s beautiful yet brutal study of closeted homosexuality in the Apartheid-era military.

Back in the bad old days of Apartheid and the early Eighties, Nicholas ‘Nick’ Van der Swart is a self-denying gay man in an incredibly prejudiced white minority-governed South Africa.

The government decides that all white young men over 16 must serve two years’ compulsory military service to defend the Apartheid regime and its racist machismo against the threat of communism in a conflict on their Angolan border.

Nick is the strong, silent, stoical type. He is called up and undergoes abusive military training under a disgusting, sadistic sergeant. Nick is scared into accepting all the horror around him to try to fit in and stay invisible, and buckles down to his training and duty, but then he starts up a dangerous relationship with another recruit.

Kai Luke Brummer is perfectly cast as Nick in Moffie (2019),

Kai Luke Brummer is perfectly cast as Nick, a mix of sensitive and strong, in co-writer/ director Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie (2019), which mounts an unbeatable assault course on prejudice, racism, machismo and homophobia. It might all be a long time ago, and some of the battles might be won, but the war goes on, Hermanus suggests, and it takes men of honour and courage like Nick to fight it.

Moffie is an urgent call to arms, contemporary in relevance, and rewarding as drama. You could call it a wartime romantic drama, as it has elements of all three. There is not much romance in South Africa, just war and conflict. But there is romance and love in Nick’s soul. We hope it works out for him.

Moffie is filmed in the Afrikaans language. Moffie is Afrikaans for pansy or queer.

It was screened at London Film Festival on 10 October 2019, and at the 34th edition of BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival at BFI Southbank, and shown on Curzon Home Virtual Cinema from 24 April 2020.

On release it had a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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