Simultaneously still and transporting, set on the rooibos-growing slopes of South Africa’s Cedarberg mountains, “Carissa” is a coming-of-age story steeped in the character of an indigenous tea loved and mispronounced the world over — its mellow late-afternoon earthiness, its burnt floral aroma, its warm tobacco hue. But if there’s a lot of muzzy magic-hour beauty in Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s debut feature, it’s no hollow travelogue: Closely scrutinizing its young, antsy title character before gradually expanding its gaze, “Carissa” is rich with feeling for the callused hands and hearts of an overlooked but industrious countryside population. No surprise that our heroine dreams of escape, though this turns out not to be a town-versus-country fable.
Instead, it’s the subtle but specific graduations of gentrification and rusticity within its remote locale that distinguish Jacobs and Delmar’s film from others of its ilk. Likewise the detail and curiosity in its depiction of a rural Cape Coloured (not a slur but a specific multiracial group in South Africa) population hitherto little depicted even in local cinema. That blend of cultural particularity and more universally seductive filmmaking technique — shades of Andrea Arnold here and Michelangelo Frammartino there, though not derivatively so — should carry “Carissa,” which premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti competition, further on the festival circuit in the coming year.
Both youthfully unlined and weary before its time, the face of twentysomething Carissa (Gretchen Ramsden) bookends the film in twin closeups, her gaze narrowed and lost in the faraway distractions of her phone. Scrolling through videos is the young woman’s principal connection to a wider world she fears missing out on, having been born and raised in the small mountainside town of Wupperthal — nearly 200 miles north of Cape Town — by her no-nonsense grandmother Wilhelmiena (Wilhelmiena Hesselman, one of many vivid non-professionals in the ensemble). Rooibos plantations surround the village; options outside that industry for locals are few.
So when plans are announced for a luxury golf estate to be built neighboring tea fields, many of Wupperthal’s younger residents sign up for the employment and education programs offered by developers. Wilhelmiena encourages Carissa to follow suit, though Carissa is less keen: Her ambitions for her future may be vague, but don’t include serving the wealthy for a middling salary. Jacobs and Delmar’s lean, character-led script avoids firm rhetorical commentary on matters of urbanization and land development, tacitly playing the benefits of new job schemes against the restless, resistant urges of the individual.
Carissa finds short-term relief from her humdrum reality in the local bar, where she routinely gets drunk and disorderly with her best friend Gladwin (Gladwin van Niekerk), to Wilhelmiena’s growing consternation. But when her misbehavior finally gets her barred from the house, she finds physical and emotional refuge in an even sleepier environment than Wupperthal: the remote rooibos farm of her estranged grandfather Hendrik (Hendrik Kriel), where she’s put to work harvesting, drying and packing the bristly, yellow-flowered crop. (Rooibos aficionados may delight in the film’s loving, methodical depiction of this earthy, tactile process.) The labor is tough, the living conditions spartan, but gradually, Carissa gains a sense of attachment to land she’s hitherto merely lived on, and to an agricultural community from whom she previously saw herself as separate. With that comes an interior calm that’s eluded her throughout her short life.
This is a modest narrative of gentle personal revelations that nonetheless feel seismic from the inside. Carissa may not travel terribly far in the course of the film, but her awareness of her existing world expands considerably, which makes for a more delicately stirring arc than expected in a coming-of-age tale of this variety. Ramsden (previously seen in South Africa’s 2019 Oscar submission “Toorbos”) gives a bright but carefully contained performance, her expression and bearing softening by fine degrees as her very being opens itself to the possibilities of her environment. Her interplay with her non-professional co-stars is natural and fluent, though any contrast in acting styles amplifies Carissa’s own dreamy air of not-quite-belonging.
Gray Kotzé’s marvelous cinematography, meanwhile, gives this small story an enriching sense of scale and texture, attuned as it is not just to the expansive natural splendor of the local landscape but less postcard-ready details of everyday light, dust and domestic space. The film’s palette may lead with the crispy, coppery browns of rooibos itself, but the tall African sky is its own constantly shifting mood board of hottest pinks and deepest blues — promising other worlds to Carissa, perhaps for other days in the future, somewhere beyond the mountain.
English (US) ·