DIFF26 | Themba | dir: Luthando Mngomezulu | 62mins
Premiere | SC5: Friday 8pm 24 July
People grieve differently. This is the premise of Mngomezulu’s Themba. The entire film is two people grieving differently, and misunderstanding each other’s grief. There is little plot business.
In one scene, Nokuthula begins to move out, has a memory and changes her mind, and nothing is made of it by the characters or by the film. This is Themba’s great power, it makes no attempt to impose meaning through explanation. Expectations are set up and overturned visually, quietly, deftly.
It is a film where people stand around, adrift. The opening funeral scene unfolds with no drama, nothing much happens in the traditional sense, and yet by the end of its sixty two minutes it left me wanting it to be a longer film. If anything, the pace of Themba is not glacial enough.
The performances are restrained, spare but sometimes veer into the overwrought, some of the staging is not quite formed, and the music often reaches too hard to tell the audience how to feel. Themba has all the hallmarks of a first feature. The film manages to transcend all of these flaws. There is one plot device so hackneyed, so obvious, and it moved me to tears.
This is exactly the kind of film for which one reserves the adjectives, “contemplative”, and “meditative”. They are not enough. Themba is a film where words are not enough. Everything proceeds because Themba struggles to find words for a deeper wound. Where it would be easy to turn this inwardness in a slow build to violence, Mngomezulu resists the obvious, avoids externalising into high drama.
Landscapes are used as a counterpoint to grief. The often overused drone shot here employed thematically. They offer little consolation to a couple whose child has just been taken from them in a random hit and run. An automated stove hob light used to signal emotional defeat.
Themba is not a perfect film, it is not even a great film, but has that rare confidence of talent. Rejecting all the easy story devices, it stays with the untranslatable core of the grief.