Off-Roads and Detours: Exploring the South African Road Film
In my third year of university, I took a course that explored lesser-known road films like The Wages of Fear, Badlands and Y Tu Mama Tambien and ever since then I have been extremely interested in the genre. Road films are unique in dealing with character development and relationships. It is a great storytelling device that shows the literal travelling of one form of yourself to another.
So recently I put on the film Susters on Showmax and it got me thinking about how effective the road film is, how it depicts the growth of a relationship and how it applies to the South African context.
If you haven’t seen the film, it tells the story of three adopted sisters (played by Diaan Lawrenson, Quanita Adams and Leah van Niekerk) who get together after their adoptive mother dies. Joined by their mother’s nurse Frans (Sean Marco Foster) the women set off on a road trip to spread their ashes at their holiday home by the sea as she requested. The sisters, who haven’t spoken in years and live separate lives, are forced to bond as they stay at a creepy guesthouse, visit a drag show/karaoke bar, spend time at an orphanage, and care for a pet snake.
The journey that these women go on, is both literal and figurative. They travel from point A to point B. But they also start the journey as strangers and end as sisters. This symbolism works so well and I wondered why more South African films don’t use this genre to tell their stories.
South Africa is a country where road travel is used frequently. We only travel by air to major cities and the rest of the way we use buses and cars to get to a destination. So it seems rife for road movies. Two films that I feel used the genre right were Pad Na Jou Hart (2014) and White Wedding (2009). Both of these had two people on the trip together.
In Pad Na Jou Hart, Basson (Ivan Botha) is travelling from Johannesburg to Cape Town to go to his father’s funeral and on the way he meets a bohemian girl called Amory (Donnalee Roberts). She teaches him about being compassionate and learning to let go and also to live life a little looser. So the film is very much, Basson’s journey, but it is also a romance between Basson and Amory and how they go from being strangers to being a couple.
White Wedding has Elvis (Kenneth Nkosi) and his best man Tumi (Rapulana Seiphemo) travelling from Durban to Cape Town for Elvis’ wedding to Ayanda (Zandile Msutwana). The pair are forced to hitchhike and meet an array of interesting characters including British doctor Rose (Jodie Whittaker). Where Elvis is the strait-laced, serious bridegroom, Tumi is the philandering playboy and we watch as their friendship hits bumps like the road and they make up as they deal with their issues.
There are probably many Leon Schuster films that fit into this genre but to be honest I don’t feel like analysing that. All three of the films depict a romanticised view of South Africa. But White Wedding, in particular, tries to address some difficult topics such as racism. In one memorable scene, Elvis, Tumi and Rose are stuck in a small town where the townspeople are proudly racist. They go into a bar and the patrons stare at the fact that Rose, a white woman is with two black men. The bar displays the old South African flag (which is illegal). But in the fantasy world that they live in, the patrons soon realise that they have more in common with Elvis and Tumi and they all get along in the end. But this is the only time I saw something that is part of most people’s realities when travelling by road in South Africa.
In essence, the fact that both White Wedding and Pad Na Jou Hart focus on duos fit perfectly into the road film genre as created by the American forefathers like Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Thelma and Louise.
“Either way, the road was destined to be travelled by a couple. This almost unwavering pattern seems a generic trace of the ideological contradiction between rebellion and tradition described above. Most often the road film couple is divided along these lines: one is more wild, the other more straight.”
- LADERMAN, DAVID. “WHAT A TRIP: THE ROAD FILM AND AMERICAN CULTURE.” Journal of Film and Video48, no. 1/2 (1996): 41–57.
Susters bucks this trend by making the group four people instead of two. But it also incorporates the best of the genre by having Jo (Lawrenson), Cecile (Adams) and Leksie (van Niekerk) go through the connection between rebellion and tradition in how it represents their relationship. Leksie and Frans are also in a bit of a romantic comedy as we watch as their feelings for each other grow during the pit stops on the trip.
The road trip aspect works especially well because it allows the characters to step away from their everyday responsibilities such as work and family and just focus on the relationships in front of them. Many of these films usually have timelines which adds to the drama. The characters need to reach their destination by a certain time which adds a sense of urgency to the storyline.
The 2023 film Runs in the Family is a great example of how the road film genre has developed in South Africa. The film is directed by Ian Gabriel and written by and stars his son Gabe. It tells the story of an Indian father and transgender son who take a road trip to break the son’s mother out of rehab. While we are still finding our cinematic voice post-apartheid, I think Runs in the Family deals with race, sexuality gender dynamics and core issues in SA like family in a way that feels more realistic. Check out our interview with Gabe Gabriel about the film here.
I’m curious to see how this genre will continue to develop as we explore topics that might be more controversial like how certain towns are extremely racist, or how poor some rural areas still are. What is the new South Africa in a place that is not urban? And how does dealing with these issues help us as individuals, and our relationships grow when we are on road trips?
References:
LADERMAN, DAVID. “WHAT A TRIP: THE ROAD FILM AND AMERICAN CULTURE.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 41–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688093. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Crushing On Interview with Gabe Gabriel: https://www.crushingonpodcast.com/podcast/gabe-gabriel
Film: Pad Na Jou Hart.
Film: Runs in the Family. Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/81616775
Film: Susters. Showmax: https://www.showmax.com/za/stream/movies/susters/a99790c6-06c5-3e65-8a73-eaa8337561b1
Film: White Wedding. Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/70127614?source=35
