Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

 
In “Malunde” (2001), the first movie written and directred by Pretoria native (born in 1963) Stefanie Sycholt, Kobus (Ian Roberts), a decorated white former soldier suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder for things he did for the apartheid regime and Wonderboy (Kagiso Mtetwa), a young black street kid in Johannesburg “come together to take on the society that has cast them both aside.” Well, perhaps “take it on” is too strong: they are trying to fine places for themselves in the then-newish ANC South Africa

I wouldn’t say they “meet cute,” but they are thrown together in very dramatic fashion, and the resourceful sometimes-glue-sniffing eleven-year-old clinging to a letter from his imprisoned mother slowly (and predictably) wins over the gruff man alienated from his wife and driving to Cape Town.

 I found the beginning of the movie confusing, even rewatching it after finishing the movie. I’m unclear what Kobus is hired to do with a can filled with cans of Rainbow Wax. I thought it was car wax, though it also serves for shining shoes and making goat horns shine, and may be furniture wax. Also there is some dialogue early on that I think is in Afrikaan and I missed some of what Wonderboy was saying without subtitles being available. Maybe if the sound was clearer I wouldn’t have longed for subtitles.

There are many odd-couple road movies and many movies in which a spirited child melts the hard crust of a misanthropic older person (Central Station, The Two of Us, to take two instances). Perhaps overly influenced by “Boy Called Twist,” it seemed to me that the winsome young black street kid (more Artful Dodger than Oliver Twist) bonds with a sort of Bill Sykes rather than Nancy. Kobus clearly is capable of violence. Though he has not gone before a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he is haunted by some of the things he did in the army “for” a country that no longer exists, and follows the commission hearings closely on tv. I guess that there is a sort of Nancy (Mosa Kaiser?), a squeeze of Kobus who may own Ronnie’s Sex Shop or only works there. She likes Wonderboy/Philip, though she is not called upon to take any risks for his sake. Kobus takes physical and (more surprisingly!) emotional risks in taking the boy in search of the boy’s family (even if he does leave Wonderboy in the truck as if he were a dog when Kobus drops in to see his own daughter).

The music written by Annette Focks is treacley and predictably manipulative. Former Fassbinder cinematographer Jürgen Jürges provided effective road-movie and urban-squalor images. The DVD has no bonus features, not even a trailer.

Sycholt has more recently (2010) adapted a book by Lutz van Dijk about Themba Matakane (Junior Singo, The Wooden Camera) realizing his dream of playing for the National soccer team, Bafana Bafana. It also involves a boy going to Cape Town (from rural Eastern Cape) in search of his mother… and having precocious sexual experience. “Themba” is not available here on DVD, alas.

©2013, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD