Verse
Marcello, Leo Luke
in-laws, the very spot where the initial murder was committed. Each time he peacefully drives up the road to the house he relives the process of delivering the killer--less an instance of the...
...Despite these defects, Cal is easily one of the best movies this year...
...More seriously, there have been charges (and picketing) claiming that The Gods Must Be Crazy is racist...
...Cai is the first feature for Irish documentary-maker Pat O'Connor, but he needs to push to get more from his associates and material, and not assume, despite its eloquence, that it speaks for itself...
...There are some technical problems with the film: the narration recounting the thoughts and activities of the bushman has appropriately been put into English for release here, but this means that the white actors, speaking Afrikaans in the original, must be awkwardly dubbed (you could hardly have subtitles given the previous English voice-over...
...Moreover, the film relies too heavily on slapstick in its middle, with too many jokes on male klutziness with damsels in distress and too frequent resort to speeded-up "keystone cops" style jungle chase sequences...
...true, it reflects that nation's power structure, with white hunters, teachers and biologists and black tribesmen, hunters, and, at best, mechanics...
...Helen Mirren, an experienced British actress, received a Cannes award as Marcella, but is here mostly supportive of Jon Lynch, a young London actor raised in Northern Ireland...
...His performance is thoroughly understated: we have often to guess his emotions from his drawn, almost wounded face...
...True, it was produced in South Africa...
...In its stark counterpointing of love and war, it may be the most moving...
...T HE GODS MUSTBE CRAZY is a genial mock heroic that, for the most part, successi~ully mixes ironic fable and jungle adventure-romance...
...The pilot of a small plane passing overhead casually tosses out a Coke bottle, which, welcome at first as a useful tool to make music or mash fruit, becomes the first object of contention in the group's existence: unlike anything else in the Kalahari world, there is only one bottle of Coke, and surprising themselves, the bushmen battle for its possession...
...Each time he peacefully drives up the road to the house he relives the process of delivering the killer--less an instance of the criminal revisiting the scene of the crime than a symbol of how Northern Ireland's consciousness seems riveted around some ancient, irredeemable wrong for which vengeance and vendetta can have no end...
...Cal is not as tragic as the first of these two predecessors, nor as fast-paced as the last...
...although we see his disgust with the violence he helped perpetrate and his desire to leave the organization, we can only imagine that, initially, he had no sense of the gravity of the acts in which he was engaged...
...Themovie, filmed in Botswana and produced in South Africa, first focuses on a group of bushmen in the Kalahari desert and details their quiet, hunter-gatherer lifestyle...
...MacLaverty's otherwise excellent screenplay should not have left these gaps...
...The climax of the movie thus makes for a gentle, whimsical send-up of traditional cinematic bloody rescues and "final battles" (see, for example, the unintentionally hilarious version of such an apocalypse in the recently released Sheena...
...A dry, laconic voice-over narration accompanies the story, at first suggesting mild amusement with primitive innocence, then gradually implying stronger satire on the ways of civilization...
...Fortunately, both for the hostage and the film, the bushman's superb tracking talents and his use of the biologist's sedatives comically and nonviolently save the day...
...Cal, however, is, at times, under-acted, under-written, and under-directed...
...without explanation, the neat closure is implausible, to say the least...
...From The Informer, to Odd Man Out, to Shake Hands with the Devil, the "troubles" in Ireland have afforded sad raw material for powerful moviemaking on the complicated conflicts of loyalty that the IRA provokes...
...Rarely has so Gothic a plot device served such politically symbolic purposes...
...But the humor is pretty much at everyone's expense, and the bushman, 5 October 1984:535...
...and some terrorist activities by black revolutionaries who, having failed in all their own non-exploits, kidnap the schoolteacher and her class...
...Moreover, we don't know what motivated him to be a part of the original IRA hit squad...
...To deepen the movie this way requires involving the bushman, however, with two rather cliched subplots: a romance between a white biologist and a blonde schoolteacher on her first excursion into the wild...
...Even the plot has too many loose ends...
...We don't know exactly what he feels for Marcella, what mixture of love or guilt, what morbidity perhaps, what desire to heal where he once hurt...
...It is solemnly renamed "the evil thing," and the bushman leader decides to go to "the edge of the world" to deposit the bottle and hope for no return...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 17
