As the clouds of Table Mountain ominously drool over its edges to the tense roar of Spoek Mathambo’s synth, the city of Cape Town sprawled beneath suddenly seems frightening and unfamiliar. This is a country haunted by the reverberations of an unresolved history, and in the best traditions of the neo-noir crime thriller,Cold Harbour transmutes this splendid coastal city into a grim locale of social decay and political discontent, this time surviving in the everyday relationships of post-apartheid South Africa. The Nigerian critic Teju Cole once spoke of Cape Town as a place filled with the sensation of living through “the aftermath of some disaster”. Writer and director Carey McKenzie has recreated this dystopian aspect of the Cape – the perfect place in which to stage her drama of a fiercely unequal society, besieged by its contradictions, in which morality no longer makes sense.
Sizwe Miya is a Khayelitsha cop with a complicated past, superbly inhabited on-screen by the charismatic Tony Kgoroge. When the mutilated body of a Triad member washes ashore, Miya finds himself drawn into the conspiratorial underworld of abalone poaching. On one side, he has his boss and mentor Venske (Deon Lotz), a man whose fatherly exterior shades his masculine insecurity, and on the other, his old struggle comrade Specialist (Fana Mokoena), a man who is existentially torn in the post-1994 order, and thrives in the shadowy spaces of organised crime. This is not a clear-cut film of good guys and bad guys but, as the director calls it, a “murky moral wilderness”, a “dark night of the soul” in which an ambitious cop slips deeper into a murder mystery and struggles to stay true to his values in a world of corrupted ideals.
At the 35thDurban International Film Festival (DIFF), Ms McKenzie and I are seated on the second floor of the Elangeni hotel, which stares out at the Natal north coast with its concrete piers like prehistoric teeth cutting into the mouth of the ocean. A different beach to that of Cold Harbour, but the same fragmented ecology of high wealth and poverty is gathered around it. McKenzie tells me that her attraction to the crime thriller genre comes from the “seductions of organised crime” and the “romance of gang lore”. “It’s almost medieval,” she says, “codes of honour, bonds of friendship to the death… silence and blood. They’re not quite primal, but they’re archetypal and epic. These romantic values are part of the appeal of gangster stories in cinema.” McKenzie set out to explore the themes of honour and comradeship in organisations outside the law. The character Specialist is a former Umkhonto we Sizwe revolutionary, disillusioned with the shattered promises of national liberation, who now does his business through crime syndicates. But Specialist is not some mere criminal. He represents the alienated fate of many former activists. As Mr. Mokoena tells me over the phone, “this is what generally happened to a lot of activists.” Once allied to a good cause, their negative experiences of the new South Africa have “effected their outlook on people, race and politics,” he says. “Specialist is a product of that. He has good intentions, but was not debriefed into this new society. That’s manifested in his life of criminality. It all comes from his past.”
The trauma of the past lurks like a sense of dread in Cold Harbour. In one charged scene, characters meet under the incomplete Eastern Boulevard highway, an interrupted road left dangling in mid-air, seeming to stand in for the unfinished business of past projects. McKenzie has superbly reimagined Cape Town’s urban spaces as a “shadowy place, where things are not what they seem.” When I ask her about the film’s dark tone, she jokes that “noir is sexy to film-makers because the lighting is so fabulous.” Her use of noir elements was strategic. She says that the crime genre presents a familiar and accessible world to audiences (think of Polanski’s Chinatown, for example). “It’s a short-cut as a film-maker to work within this established framework,” she says, adding that she was “striving to subvert the expectations” of this traditional setup. Viewers who approach this film as a straight-forward thriller might end up missing out on its cerebral and political dimensions. “The mission of the hero is not to discover who killed the guy on the beach,” McKenzie tells me. That opening riddle is more of a vehicle with which she pursues the classic crime themes of personal vengeance, ambitious men trying to stay clean in a dirty world, and the desperate venality of human nature under conditions of pressure. On some level, these are certainly clichés. But as McKenzie says, “hopefully these are character types and not stereotypes.” It’s the imaginative way in which she uses these grand and nostalgic themes to represent authentic South African problems – like xenophobia, the country’s racial psychodynamics, global business encroaching on local producers – that make them so intriguing.
Tony Kgoroge agrees that this film is really about “the personal and emotional journey” of Sizwe Miya, rather than the whodunit enigma it opens up with. Speaking about the film’s focus on abalone or perlemoen poaching, he laughs that he had no idea what “perlemoen” was when he was first approached with the script. Breaking the word apart into its English equivalents, he says “I actually thought it might be an orange with diamonds or something stuffed inside.” Kgoroge’s research for the part brought him into contact with low-rent constables who are “working under the most messed-up conditions.” He says, “Some of them don’t have money to get to work. They have to take local taxis where they might be riding with some criminal they busted, or the friend of some guy they arrested.” His character Sizwe Miya is one of those honest detectives trying to escape that world, but finding that he can’t do it without getting drawn into the corrupt system he works in.
There have been murmurs of discontent about Cold Harbour at DIFF over the last couple of days, and some people think the film doesn’t deliver enough of a thriller experience. But I think it should be forgiven because it dares to explore some sophisticated themes that we don’t usually confront in our genre cinema. In one impressive scene, Sizwe is at his boss Venske’s house, being slowly manipulated. Kgoroge says that, “There’s a saying in the ghetto that in every black man’s success, there’s always a white man standing behind.” He tells me that Venske represents the kind of guy who says “Hey, that whole apartheid nonsense is gone. We can be friends. You can be my brother.” But in reality, he says, Venske is the authority figure and Sizwe must respect him in order to get a promotion. When Sizwe refuses to play by Venske’s rules, Deon Lotz gives us a masterful performance of a threatened and territorial white masculinity, uncertain of its place in the new South Africa. “Just now someone in Pretoria decides there are too many white faces, and I’m out of a job,” Venske reasons. Growing fearful, he tries to humiliate Sizwe, telling his daughter that while he bought her a laptop for her birthday and can provide for his family, “Sizwe is twice your age and can’t even use a laptop. Do you know why? Because Sizwe never finished school.” The film is radical enough to speak about the persistence of apartheid power dynamics in our society.
Speaking to me about the restlessness of South Africa, Mokoena says that “there should be happy medium between [peoples of all colours] in the spirit of building the country.” However, he observes that “we are still divided in many ways. This has kind of put everybody in a corner. We’re not able to relate to each other in that equal space. That’s the unfortunate legacy of this transition. As a collective, we haven’t really moved along.” Mokoena’s character, Specialist, is seen trying to lure Sizwe into organised crime. “It’s these old white people from apartheid,” Specialist seethes. “Now they’re playing goodie goodie. It pisses me off every time you have to beg a white person to be somebody. Where were they when we were in the struggle?” Specialist’s remarks perceptively grasp at what Kgoroge calls “an underlying state of dissatisfaction in the country about where we are.” In Specialist’s words we get a glimpse of the black anger at an untransformed South Africa – a complex and misunderstood emotion that it is encouraging to see finally being openly expressed. But Specialist also acts as a complex figure of the crime world. As a man who feels the government has failed him, he prefers to work outside the law, seeing himself as a kind of Robin Hood figure who can continue to look after his people. McKenzie speaks about her interest in how ordinary people find dissonant ways to justify their actions.
Towards the end of our conversation, Kgoroge reminisces about Chris Hani, saying “he was one of the good guys. And it’s that guy that I loved so much that died.” Mokoena says, “I have that romantic view of a South Africa where we’re actually dealing with issues of poverty and striving for a more equal society.” It’s clear that along with McKenzie, these three film-makers are interested in creating a thriller story which is not simply entertaining, but which also offers a new vantage on the troublesome state of the country. AndCold Harbourdoes this stylishly, featuring a femme fatale (Yu Nan) and a mazy plot of double-crossers, most of which takes place under a dim smear of autumn sky. McKenzie tells me about a Jamaican friend she met in London who once said to her, “I wear money like kneepads to crawl around in a white world.” This is poignant and harsh image of the existential frontiers of being black in a society with surreal disequilibria in wealth and advantage.Cold Harbouris something of a victory for bringing these tensions out of the shadows and engaging them openly.