If, like me, you felt a small welcome shock at hearing of a movie about the South African conscripts, you are in for rather a disappointment in this film. If, again like me, you crave films that bravely take on an idea or a subject and artfully, stunningly bring about the realisation, the recognition, the heightening in your consciousness of that idea or subject, regardless of the setting and circumstances, you, too, should prepare yourself for discontent and regret here.
Firstly, the reasons for the conscription and war are never mentioned in the film, letting slide an ideal opportunity to examine an event of great importance in South African history. Secondly, nowhere is any character sketched in anything other than the roughest, broadest outlines. One supposes the characters are meant to be familiar to us (each being a common type regularly shown on South African television), and that the filmmakers have avoided specifics so that the story of one recruit and one family may be taken as a metaphor for a generation.
Unfortunately, the outcome of this broadening is not an amplification in the story's importance, nor a figurative device rich in meaning. It just makes for a banal plot, and certainly does no good at all for understanding anything about the Bush War or the conscription. An entire generation was called up in arms against a faceless, nameless enemy, and nobody ever spoke about it, then or now. This film illustrates that one fact successfully, but it's exactly the reality that this kind of film should exist to undo.
The film concludes with Paul visiting schools as a guest speaker, and telling the matric students about his experiences at the border. Admirable as it is that someone at last is saying something, what does it help that the only story the boys hear is his? Without giving too much of the plot away, the only lesson to be taken from his specific story is not to be brave, and not to endanger yourself to help a friend. And, again, if all he is telling the boys is what we've seen before in the movie then still no one has learnt anything about the impact this war has had, apart from the purely physical one on this specific individual.
Roodt's film's performances are what pass for good, natural acting, and the plot, inherently drab and already somewhat bleak, is sunk even lower by the filmmakers' indifference to the characters' psychologies and finer emotions. When Roodt does take to putting in commentary, his images and rhetoric are so plain and so blunt that all artistic potential is lost. "Seun" is not worthy of its subjects, and we need something far more substantial and challenging if a South African film is to engage in discussing this or any other of our historical issues.
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