Flatland
Directed by Jenna Bass
Running time: 1hr57 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Izel Bezuidenhout and Nicole Fortuin in Flatland
I recently spent a couple of weeks in my home country of South Africa, with a large portion that spent driving through a region still fairly unknown to me: the vast, little-peopled expanse of the Northern Cape, which flows from bristly, faded grassland, with diamonds nestled in the ground below, to the stark outright desert of the Karoo, where patches of flowering fynbos disrupt the fired earth. It’s a setting made for cinema, and the odd homegrown film has taken advantage of that dry, spare beauty — though few have tapped its atmospheric upside-down Hollywood potential like Jenna Bass’s Flatland, a distinctly modern Southern Western that made a vivid impression on me in Berlin a couple of years ago, but never found the UK distribution it deserved.
I say Western, but the film’s genre is as freely mixed and hybridised as its flavourfully blended, code-switching Afrikaans-English dialogue: it’s a girls’-trip road movie, a high-stakes coming-of-age tale, a detective story and a chase thriller, packing significant heat in all those modes. It springs into action fast, as teenage bride Natalie (Nicole Fortuin) bails on her unwanted marriage to a white cop, leaves an intervening priest for dead, and heads for the horizon astride her trusty horse. Along for the ride is her best friend Poppie (Izel Bezuidenhout), reckless and pregnant and a magnet for bad-news boys; on their tail is intrepid detective Beauty (Faith Baloyi), a black woman with more empathy than most for her quarry. None of this can end entirely well, though the fallout can only be lively; the fast, chaotic unrest of post-apartheid South African society is distilled in this trio of variously hungry, independent women.
Squint and you can see a bit of Andrea Arnold in Flatland’s sparking, hit-the-ground-running energy, though any influences Bass cribs from international cinema are so thoroughly made over in her own chosen vernacular and landscape that the film can’t help but feel alluringly strange to outsiders and cockily, irresistibly itself to fellow Saffers. Even the sky — high, wide, swarming the frame when the camera isn’t locked in besotted close-up with any one of its magnetic female leads — is shot in parched pastel shades that feel as particular as the film’s not-quite-translatable verbal idioms or its frenetic local needle-drops. But you’ll get it anyway: the desire and desperation that power its story through unknown plains are as elemental and familiar as any story of love, or life, on the run.
FLATLAND (2019) Written by Jenna Bass | Shot by Sarah Cunningham | Edited by Jacques de Villiers