Over the last few years, South Africa has been drowsily awaking from a long season of feel-good repression. All the national slogans of the ‘90s renaissance (“local is lekker”, “rainbow nation”) seem incoherent when placed alongside the morbid symptoms of the present – loss of faith in old heroes, perverse distribution of power and advantage, racial alienation and violence. Necktie Youth is one of the few South African films that aims to explore the existential fallout, the spiritual aftermath of apartheid, in which our unreconciled history seems to invade the deepest intimacies of our social and sexual lives. Jabulani (Bonko Cosmo Khoza) and September (Sibs Shongwe-La Mer) are a couple of rich, post-teenage youths, belonging to a generation of “born-frees”. They spend most of the film “hanging out” in the classic sense of youth, aimlessly cruising through a monochromatic landscape of a disillusioned South Africa, watching the streets of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs unspool from beyond the dashboard of daddy’s Jaguar. They lurch from one party to the next, half-slurring their way through conversations about their depression and dislocation, all delivered in a rhythmic, American argot.
Jabz and September are in “phantom mode”, ghosting through the city on a cocktail of prescription drugs and brandy on the self-destructive quest to find redemption from the emptiness of modern life in the distractions of pleasure. What starts out as a study of the inner life of the depression, self-absorption and posturing of a class of individuals, gradually and subtly gathers elements of a vaster political realm into its orbit. Apartheid, that vanishing era, returns. It is there, as the film shows us, concealed in the social geography of the country, in the domestic workers looking after the white toddler, and in the splendid moment of anxiety Jabz faces when he rolls up to a stop-street in his sleek-snouted Jag, and tries to scratch coins together for a beggar, to soothe his troubled conscience. But the film is at its most challenging when it depicts the psychosexual dynamics of inter-racial relationships, drawing on the social patrolling, transgressive thrills, sexual mythology, and general anxiety that all underscores the supposedly “natural” phenomenon of desire.
South Africa has ample interesting film-makers, among them Shongwe-La Mer, Jenna Bass, Jahmil X.T. Qubeka and Oliver Hermanus. Each, in their own way, has challenged the Hollywood dogma prevailing in much of our film industry, by creating uncomfortable and stylish parables about the underside of the transition. For its part, Necktie Youth offers an introspective vantage on a bleak sliver of the after-life of apartheid. Shongwe-La Mer, the 23 year-old director, plays the part of September with a streetwise charisma that reminds me of Mookie in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Although the characters sometimes come across as vapid and indulgent, their characterisation reveals the dissonance underneath all the glamour. Their accumulated “coolness” is a self-defence mechanism, the mask they wear to desperately avoid confronting their real phantoms. Taken alongside films like Love the One You Love and fiction like The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga, Necktie Youth signals an artistic generation that is imaginatively trying to make sense of its complicated inheritance. This is an exciting prospect for our cinema, which has long been under the domination of a single vision of history.