Reactionary Review | Landmyn | dir: Nico Scheepers
Landmyn ebbs and seethes through a winter family holiday by the beach.
Siblings Colette, Johan and Lisa, one returned from a career in London (or Scotland) apparently making coffee, the other an up and coming playwright and director (plainly the autobiographical hinge of the film – you can tell this because the other characters accuse him of being pretentious) and their younger sister, who is rebelling, presumably as she has dyed her hair red. The three of them find themselves at a beach house somewhere in the Cape, paid for by the older sister, who breaks the news that their mother is coming as well. Portent sets in. Who pays for what is where the faultlines lie.
If I am making Landmyn sound a little heavy handed, that's because it is, but just a little. Yet, it succeeds despite that, through a series of subtle performances and shifts in tone, a sense of foreboding of the mundane. The spell of Landmyn is occasionally broken by some not so subtle, on the nose, intention signaling around intergenerational views on race and sexual agency, an aunt gets out of a taxi muttering, “Nigerians,” a very hammy exchange between the mother and son about interracial dating. In its loudest moments Landmyn overexplains what is so very evident in its whispers: this is a film about young people and old people not being able to understand each other's choices, and it is unflinching on that devastation. When it strips down to bareness, winter light, wind, the family on the cold beach in the distance while a mother contemplates her choices, Landmyn grabs your heart in its fist.
Anna-Mart van der Merwe as Annatjie holds the film together, the first act setting her up to be the landmine, she spends the rest of the film revealing that the landmine is buried deeper. The bothersome mother is a product of time, misunderstanding and grief, unmoored by circumstance. At the end Nicole Holm as her sister Beth, with a corresponding grief, sees what the children, without the benefit and decay of time, cannot: people are bound by their mutual misunderstandings. Landmyn is an open wound.
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