Reactionary Reviews | Black Burns Fast | dir: Sandulela Asanda | 95mins
Black Burns Fast gets right into it upfront, announcing and dispensing with setup and exposition in teen rapid-fire dialogue, overcompensating, overstating, and shrugging all at the same time. Self-consciously un-self-conscious. It would be easy to be mean about the overacting teens, but you know what? Teens overact irl.
I must announce my bias upfront. Mean Girls is probably my favourite film of all time.
Once Black Burns Fast gets over all the announcing of what it is, it settles quickly into discovering what it is, and Eshile Ndleleni as Luthando gets into discovering who she is. All tropes are followed, all norms are upended. This is a deeply political film, via glitter and 8-bit.
Simply put BBF is a high school love story, complete with ye old school dance as its destination. Kids dodge school security while sneaking around in the dark, get detention, have awkward conversations with mom, talk back to teachers during sex education and smoke their first ciggarette, have their first kiss, get set up with a boy for the dance while wanting to go with someone else, fall out, make up, make out. Black Burns Fast explores the shaky crossroads of peer pressure and self-discovery all in a gloriously goofy swirl of stylistic quirks, some straight from the grade 11 play.
Luthando navigates the discovery of that first love, the resulting fallout with her BFF, her newly found popularity with all the inherent anxieties, and while discovering herself, makes all the mistakes, deals with all the betrayals, has all the awakenings.
Where BBF really succeeds is in the world building details: naturalistic background action, a score that knows its place, real world lighting, a sound mix that gets gossip right, abstracted visual quirks, fussy teachers that make it all about themselves, the fact that the mean girls are actually quite sweet, and the okes in sunglasses pall-bearing the hamster funeral.
The central performances of Luthando, her BFF Jodie (Mila Smith) and Ayanda (Muadi Ilung), are grounded in the emotional core of every moment, giving the film an inner life so rare in contemporary South African cinema. Black Burns Fast is everything Spud wishes it could have been.
I cannot be enthusiastic enough about Black Burns Fast; it should be a compulsory set work in both first year media studies and grade ten Life Orientation.
You should bunk school to see it.
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