I remember Leon Schuster as the mascot for the false dawn of South African reconciliation. Looking back, he was part of the cultural wing of the new South Africa in the ‘90s, as integral as the phrases “rainbow nation” and “local is lekker” to half-convincing us we were all getting along. Everyone has some vague nostalgia for his old VHS candid-camera compilations, where ye masses of the land are brought together in some truly absurd scenarios. But these days, Schuster continues to have the charisma of a wayward uncle at a dinner party, who after one too many down the old gullet is indulging his fondness for retrograde jokes. Pay Back the Money, his swansong to the game, is as ever, a hearty casserole of stereotypes and prejudice. Who in 2015, can see Schuster wearing that blackface get-up of his while playing a government official, replete with phony accent and general demeanour of incompetence, and not find it all hopelessly the product of another era?
The plot follows Schuster making a documentary on the country that generally involves him doing hidden camera stunts and going undercover in a variety of guises. The phrase “you’ve been schucksed!” is like a magical spell in South Africa, an abracadabra of reconciliation, that makes people smile nervously and quickly forget the indignities that have just been visited upon them by an incognito Schuster. Early on in the film, he presumes that a white man’s black girlfriend is his domestic worker, and seconds before he gets a righteous upper-cut to the face, he yells “you’ve been schucksed!”, and all indecencies dissolve in a reconciliatory embrace and a nervous eyeing of the camera. Much of the humour in the film comes from the comic indignation of ordinary people fed up with bureaucratic bullshit, like the woman who, when faced with Schuster as an Eskom official selling candles, sets a new land-speed record for saying “daar’s ‘n klomp kak” as many times as possible in under one minute.
But Pay Back the Moneyis also Schuster’s love-letter to a vanishing South Africa that never really existed. At the end, he recapitulates the idea that South Africa is now a “broken” country, but was working in its glory days, invoking the prelapsarian myth shared by many that the old South Africa was, in spite of its institutionalised racism and humiliation, a working system. Yes, Schuster wants to bond us together, but everyone knows that mutual hates are a better basis for community than mutual loves, and so we’re all enjoined to indulge the national pastime and hate on the government. This is laughter in the dark, and Schuster even opens the film by exclaiming: “I’m a white oke in a blackout,” where a blackout obviously symbolises more than mere load-shedding. Pay Back the Money is a schizophrenic comedy, lurching from one uneasy punchline to the next.