Moffie

There’s no short­age of films which focus on a young man’s sex­u­al awak­en­ing, and even before Call Me by Your Name made a heart­throb of Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met, queer nar­ra­tives were among the most heart­felt and vital of these, from James Ivory’s Mau­rice to Het­tie MacDonald’s Beau­ti­ful Thing.

Oliv­er Her­manus’ Moffie is indeed a com­ing-of-age sto­ry cen­tred on a gay pro­tag­o­nist, but set against the back­drop of 1980s South Africa it becomes a pun­ish­ing, heart­break­ing tale of clan­des­tine long­ing and aggres­sive mas­cu­line performance.

The film’s title refers to the Afrikaans slang word for a gay man – in par­tic­u­lar, it implies weak­ness, effem­i­na­cy and abnor­mal­i­ty. Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brum­mer) is aware of this as he enters com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice, defend­ing the Apartheid régime against the so-called ​“wart gevaar”, or ​“black dan­ger”. Qui­et and brood­ing, Nick does his best to fit in along­side his fel­low recruits, which large­ly means tak­ing orders and engag­ing in a suit­able amount of broth­er­ly hijinks.

Struc­tured in a sim­i­lar way to Stan­ley Kubrick’s Full Met­al Jack­et, the first half of Moffie sees Nick engaged in basic train­ing, while the lat­ter sees him deployed with his South African Defence Force unit. The young men are detached from the war, with lit­tle inter­est in who they’re fight­ing or why – fatigued and bru­talised by train­ing, their main focus is main­tain­ing a pack men­tal­i­ty and not doing any­thing to draw the ire of their com­mand­ing officer.

But fel­low sol­dier Dylan Stassen (Ryan de Vil­liers) draws Nick’s atten­tion, dis­in­ter­est­ed in rough­hous­ing or the pur­suit of war­fare as glo­ry. Nick knows that his desire is con­sid­ered a per­ver­sion – to be out­ed would be a death sen­tence – yet Dylan offers much-need­ed ten­der­ness that can’t be found any­where else in a war­zone. And Her­manus nev­er pre­tends it’s any­thing else; the film is often loud and bloody, gru­elling and vio­lent. It’s a dif­fi­cult watch, but not half as dif­fi­cult as sur­viv­ing it must have been for André Carl van der Mer­we, who wrote the mem­oir of the same name.

Although Nick remains qui­et­ly hope­ful that he can emerge from his mil­i­tary ser­vice unscathed, and that love can indeed be found in a hope­less place, Moffie isn’t a romance. There’s stark real­ism in the beau­ty of the coun­try, with its stun­ning blue skies and crys­tal clear oceans. It could be par­adise, but the greed and ram­pant hatred that rule in the Apartheid régime infect every­thing. Moffie is a bleak but nec­es­sary reminder that we still have so far to go before every­one is allowed to love who they love with­out liv­ing in fear.