The film opens with whispered words. We’re hearing the sotto voice of eight-year-old Bobo Fuller (Lexi Venter) as she wakes in a darkened house, needing to go to the toilet. The electricity is out, a candle flickers into flame, and she disturbs her older sister Vanessa (Anina Hope Reed), and they fumble to the bathroom. Independence is coming to the then Rhodesia, soon to be Zimbabwe, as the 1980s dawn.
Based on and adapted from the best-selling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa, Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, is the story of a childhood in Zimbabwe spent on African farms. Nicknamed Bobo by her parents, she has the run of the farm, riding through it on a scooter, clambering barefoot, grubby-cheeked, hair wild and unkempt. Life seems idyllic.
Except it’s not for her parents, Nicola (Embeth Davidtz) and Tim (Rob van Vuuren). The farm they bought is struggling, squatters are moving onto the land, they and their family and friends are hoping that Robert Mugabe isn’t elected, desperately urging their black workers not to vote for him. There are violent scenes on TV as this new country struggles into being.
This is the adult world, but it’s filtered through a child’s perspective and understanding so that we witness life unfolding, and sometimes unravelling, through a gauze of innocence.
We see Bobo’s mother, Nicola, cradling both a hangover and an assault rifle for protection on this remote farm. Some of Bobo’s whispered words include her parents’ admonitions not to suddenly wake them in the middle of the night as they might shoot her accidentally, the presumption being that an intruder might be trying to get in. We hear more of Bobo’s voice-overs throughout, which underpin the narrative thread of the film: a period when Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe.
The farm is remote, the roads dusty, the sun high and white and glaring. The interior of the farm is more shabby than chic, it is a place of make-do, and is brilliantly rendered.
This is a world of menace, and not just for the white farm inhabitants. There’s Sarah (Zikhona Bali), one of the workers on the farm who Bobo is close to, and Sarah takes it on herself to provide some of the mothering that Nicola can’t do due to her own alcoholism and tight focus on making sure the farm survives. Sarah lets her visit her room and play dress up, and tells her stories, and these scenes are touched with whimsy and the obvious delight the two share in each other’s company. Bali’s portrayal of Sarah is gently nuanced.
But Jacob (Fumani N Shilubana), Sarah’s husband, is less sure that this is a good thing, and warns her against it. The farm is being watched by soldiers and freedom fighters, in the hills there are the telltale blinks from glass, probably binoculars, and such close association can be misconstrued, or worse.
In trips to town, Bobo watches from the safety of a 4x4 as demonstrators shout and march through the streets holding placards. A visit to a grandmother is a stark contrast and juxtaposition to the new country that is being birthed. Played with a genteel finesse by Judy Ditchfield, the grandmother represents all the old colonial values and systems. A servant brings the tea, the room is shuttered from the harsh sun, and noise of demonstrators, and the grandmother talks of people like themselves who have no money but have “breeding”.
But the old world is dying. Bobo accompanies her mother as she does a shift as a police reservist and skips out to peer into the dark cells that hold faces that glare silently from the interiors. Bobo waves farewell to her father going off with guns and men to patrol for days, urging her father to turn around as the men head out, almost jocularly. He does not turn around.
And Bobo is there when her mother heads out on horseback to the squatters on the farm, shouting desperately for them to go away. They look at her: it’s clear they are not going anywhere. Davidtz is excellent as Nicola, and in this scene this woman’s desperation is shown with visceral intensity, her harsh screaming voice absorbed by bush and the squatters’ silence; she is effectively ineffectual. Davidtz shows just how desperate Nicola is at this point, and the scene is a tour de force.
It is also a demonstration of undiluted racism and provides for an unsettling moment. There are other moments, too, as the whites’ racism lets rip at points throughout the film. Even children are not exempt from expressing this racism: Bobo plays with some of the black workers’ children, bossing them, making them play at being servants, until she is told off by one of the servants and is made aware of what she is doing.
It’s a world of tension, fighting the inevitable hard work and hard drinking, and when at a party the strains of I Wonder by Sixto Rodriguez start playing, and Nicola dances to that song, you feel that some of the cares of that world dissipate. But there is always that edge, that awareness of one world dissolving to make room for something new, though no-one knows what that world will be.
It is really Davidtz and Venter who carry the film. Venter was chosen through a Facebook call-out, and it’s hard to imagine that she is not a professional actor. She is charming, cheeky, adorable, a likable soaring gigantic presence on screen as she shows us this turmoiled world through her own eyes. Davidtz carries the tension of Nicola’s world in her body and face, a woman coiled and ready to spring. But we also learn that other demons haunt her as the narrative unspools to record the death of a toddler, Bobo’s younger sister, making clear that there are other reasons for Nicola’s twists of personality. All this means that we root for her, despite some of her racist attitudes, and feel sympathy for her and the family, while being aware that the world is changing.
And it is Davidtz who was responsible for making the film. She first came to prominence in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and has gone on to star in a host of other films, such as Matilda, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Junebug and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and the TV seriesIn Treatment.
She wrote the screenplay, produced the film, and directed and acted in it. Referring to turning her hand at directing as well, she says, “I knew what the story needed to be and I just took a deep breath and jumped in!”
Davidtz was born in the US to SA parents who returned to the country when she was eight in the 1970s. There were resonances with what occurred in Zimbabwe with some of her experiences growing up. She says that “my childhood played out, not in a full-blown war like that of Zimbabwe’s, but in a place at war more quietly (but just as viciously), enforced by a brutally oppressive government, with casual acts of racial violence occurring around me daily”.
She was drawn to the memoir initially “because of how beautifully Fuller writes. She’s very funny and very descriptive, she really knows how to capture the place and wrote with this inner voice that to me became the basis of Bobo, the way she would describe her younger self as cheeky and bossy, and the things that she would say that [were] awful but … funny at times as well. I could just hear that voice, and it’s what captivated me. Also her descriptions of her family and her mother, who was a very compelling character, I thought this would be interesting to explore.”
The film, first released in the US, has drawn positive reviews and interest. Ty Burr of The Washington Post describes her as a “natural filmmaker” while Caryn James of The Hollywood Reporter calls the film “beautifully realised”.
I asked Davidtz if this meant that overseas audiences were ready for stories from Southern Africa. She responded positively: “I think that’s illustrated by the fact that America responded as they did. I didn’t know … until I saw the reviews for the film and the way that audiences have responded. This response has been amazing.” She added that though overseas audiences did’t know the history of the region, they did know about apartheid, for example. “It’s just been a wonderful surprise that basically critics all over the world have loved the film as much as they have.”
To that end, would she want to film more stories from this part of the world? “Definitely I want to. And from Alexander Fuller who’s an incredible writer.”
I was also curious to know how Davidtz went about adapting the story and writing a film script, as this is her first time doing so. “The writing process was very slow, but I really enjoyed it. The first couple of years of it I would do it for a bit then I’d leave it alone for four months, and [then] go back to it. So, honestly, I enjoyed that it felt very leisurely. There was a part when I was really trying to crack the code of the narrative and trying to figure out what the film’s story was, because the book covers so many years and the film is a short period.”
The original memoir covers Fuller’s entire childhood, and sees the family living in other countries too, Malawi and Zambia, and ends when Fuller marries in her early 20s. The film also shifts the timelines to tell the story, which only spans the end of Rhodesia, and white rule, and the beginning of Zimbabwe.
As for the preparation of the writing, Davidtz says, “The only thing I needed to prepare for the writing process was to figure out how to use the writing program on the computer called Final Draft. That was very slow and would have been very frustrating if somebody else was watching me do it, but I finally figured it out and was able to write the screenplay.
“I’ve read so many scripts in my life — I’ve been in the business for almost 40 years — that you don’t realise when you’re reading that many scripts for that many years you can tell the difference between a good one and a bad one. You can tell what works and what doesn’t.”
When it came time to both direct and act, Davidtz says, “Juggling the acting and directing was hard because I had nobody watching me, that was the hardest part of it. I didn’t have anybody telling me what to do so I had to very much just go on my instincts and try a couple of different things and move on quickly. We didn’t have a ton of time, because we had such limited time with a child and there were a lot of scenes that we had to cover. I focused on the directing, and when the time came for me to act I did as few takes as possible. But I feel like I prepared enough by knowing the story well enough. I think that probably helped me.”
The result is a powerful film that brings to life the noisy violence of living in a country that has been shredded by war, only slightly softened by Bobo’s childlike wonder. It’s magnificent, presenting a portrait of a time in place through vivid brushstrokes that remain after the initial viewing.
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