A story that never quite takes flight
|||MIGNON “MOSSIE” VAN WYK
DIRECTOR: Darrell Roodt
CAST: Paul du Toit, Elzette Maarschalk, Johan Scholtz, Deànré Reiners, Tanika Fourie
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG
RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
A coming-of-age story, narrated in hindsight, this Afrikaans teen drama is nowhere near as messy as real life.
It safely and neatly packages and explains away how teenaged girls’ (or rather this particular one, named Mossie) emotions hop all over the place, but it’s okay because it is all a learning experience.
Darrell Roodt’s latest film is the tale of the eponymous teenage girl and the boy next door. You know, the story of the girl who didn’t see what she had under her nose until after the fact.
The film starts with Mignon van Wyk (played by Anani Nel as a 5-year-old) getting her nickname from little Adriaan (Juan-Adrian de Beer) next door as quiet-as-a-mouse little sister, Luna (Mia de Villiers), looks on. The two little girls are soon sent back home where mom is dying and the action then flips forward a decade.
Now teenaged Mossie (Fourie) is still best friends with Adriaan (Reiners), who has developed a crush on his friend, but he knows better than to blurt it out because she’s grown into a teen who struggles with overt emotional displays.
So, he watches from the sidelines as she becomes enamoured of an older boy, Leon (suitably smarmy Devon Hofmeyr), who keeps on trying to beat his track record (he’s into running) and quiet little Luna (Kiara Fourie) watches everyone.
A touch of the real world impinges when Leon pressures Mossie to take the relationship up a notch, but she can call upon Adriaan to save the day.
Mossie’s trouble with expressing emotion is more a filmic crutch for suggesting effect rather than cause.
So, too, a narration by an older voice purporting to be adult Luna – who has now gained an understanding for her sister’s perplexing teenage behaviour – provides the emotional cues for what the audience should experience. While the story is thus told in hindsight by Luna, what we see is not really all that confusing, and using this construction of narrator makes no sense since we never get a feel for Luna being particularly observant or insightful. So, she is the voice simply because what plays out in front of you doesn’t give you the emotional fall-out of the story. That apparently happens sometime in Mossie’s future. Now that scene, the two sisters talking about what actually happened versus what everyone thought they saw (and what we see on screen), would have been an impactful way of framing the story.
A lot of the narration is beautifully poetic, though in the original Afrikaans with the English subtitles, merely prosaic in comparison. The soundtrack is dreamily atmospheric, drawing on contemporary duos from Digby and the Lullaby to a wonderful ballad from Francois van Coke and Karen Zoid and scenes which look backward to their childhood are filmed in a warm golden glow.
The two leads have a believably warm chemistry, it’s just that the script gives them cliches to work with. But, if you’re a teenager who hasn’t seen this story on screen many times before, what you see is really all you need.
If you liked Hanna Hoekom or Lien se Lankstaan Skoene, you will like this.