On a faintly misty morning in South Africa’s Kamiesberg mountain region, 79-year-old goatherd Hettie (Hettie Farmer) watches her flock as they hobble and nibble along the rough, khaki-colored landscape, and wonders for the first time if they wonder about her. Is she a mother to them, or an omnipotent ruler? She’s not inclined toward sentimentality or anthropomorphism, and she’s had enough children of her own in a long, hard-up life. But poetry colors pragmatism in the narration that runs throughout “Variations on a Theme.” Liltingly read in a characterful Afrikaans vernacular by co-director Jason Jacobs, it dips in and out of various characters’ inner dialogues in the close rural neighborhood of Kharkams, seeing the philosophical substance in unassuming lives.
A deserving winner of the top prize in the Tiger Competition at this year’s Rotterdam festival, “Variations on a Theme” is itself a deceptively modest affair, running just barely to feature length as it takes in the rustling environmental details and the lolling pace of most days in Hettie’s small, deprived village. But there’s political and historical heft to this elegiac, tea-stained snapshot, as directors Jacobs and Devon Delmar consider how decades of compacted racial discrimination and governmental neglect have shaped the self-sufficient routine of Hettie and many others like her.
It’s a worthy, quietly more radical follow-up to the duo’s excellent, Venice-premiered 2024 debut “Carissa,” another portrait of a marginalized Cape community of the type that tends to get little representation in South African cinema. Though that film never got the degree of festival exposure or arthouse distribution that it deserved, one hopes the Rotterdam win will go further towards putting Jacobs and Delmar emphatically on the world-cinema map — as proudly regional filmmakers with a lyrical sensibility to stand beside that of fellow Southern African auteur Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. But there’s a warmly observational, literary quality to their work, too, lovingly attentive to language and local custom, in the spirit of such long-gone storytellers as Herman Charles Bosman and Eugène Marais.
Per the opening credits, Jacobs and Delmar’s gently meandering script is “based on true stories,” though the tone of the exercise weaves freely between cockeyed whimsy and documentary-style portraiture — the latter impression enhanced by the casting of lively non-professionals in key roles. Some faces from “Carissa” pop up again, including that film’s scene-stealer Gladwin van Niekerk, here appearing as the village’s spendthrift hairdresser. But the film belongs to Farmer, Jacobs’ own grandmother, who gives Hettie an unfussy sturdiness of mien and spirit to counter the growing, sighing frailty of her person, and a steady, narrow stare that occasionally seems to see through time.
Widowed for some years, Hettie has grown solemnly fond of the solitary life, though her children — who have long since departed for bigger towns, believe the time has come for her to live with them. Leaving Kharkams, where Hettie has lived her entire life, would mean leaving behind various ghosts that kept her company over the years — most notably that of her father Petrus, who settled in the village after four years spent fighting abroad in the Second World War, a time of his life he preferred never to speak about.
A prologue, accompanied by stirring archival footage, addresses the South African government’s unjust treatment of black soldiers like Petrus — whose state reward for his service upon his return was a bicycle and a pair of boots, while many of his white counterparts were welcomed home with land and livestock. Eight decades later, Hettie still feels the social and economic impact of that insult, and is first to sign up when she hears of a government reparations scheme, promising overdue compensation to the descendants of black veterans — though only after a maze of paperwork and an administrative payment on her end. A clear scam, it has taken in Hettie and a number of her neighbors, now waiting in vain for a payday that will never come.
Still, Hettie is used to waiting indefinitely for better days that may or may not arrive, and with her 80th birthday celebrations imminent, she feels little anguish as she takes stock of a life still replete with small, alive things. Those include her goats (whose tinkling bells provide a near-constant soundtrack atop Mikhaila Alyssa Smith’s elegant, restrained piano themes) and her cats, an undefined tangle of grandchildren, and the local flora and fauna she silently greets on her daily ramblings.
Jacobs’ narration, beautifully and often wittily written, articulates this awareness without imposing a loftier worldview on the character, and sometimes digresses into the yearnings and peculiarities of other Kharkams residents — a man hopefully digging for diamonds in the bare earth of his living room, another dozily reflecting on a 1970s one-night stand that remains his life’s high-water mark. Cinematographer Gray Kotzé likewise captures the region’s scruffy natural beauty, with its ruddy fynbos flowers and dry, putty-hued soil, without overly dignifying or prettifying it, and gazing with equal interest and affection at the unlovely zinc buildings and barbed-wire fences that mark human life there.
English (US) ·