Sweetheart directed by Michael Matthews (review)

Sweetheart, directed by Michael Matthews, is a postapartheid South African science fiction film. Like many other films that have recently been produced in South Africa, it is part of a new wave of African cinema, and alongside other films such as the Kenyan-directed short film Pumzi (dir. Wanuri Kahiu, 2010) and the feature-length South African film District 9 (dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2009), it provides further evidence of changes in African cinema. These changes are not entirely new and are seen in, for example, the growth of the Nollywood film industry and the variety of feature-length and short films produced on the continent.

Sweetheart begins with the sound of a changing radio frequency interspersed with snippets of news about the Cold War. The mise-en-scène of the opening is the large kitchen of a farmhouse in which a woman prepares breakfast for a family. The relationships among the characters, where they are, and what we are hearing in the diegetic sounds of the radio are unclear and somewhat confusing. The use of black and white gives the film a dated texture. This feeling of the past is aided by the character of Inge Beckman, who plays the young woman named Sweetheart. She is a stereotypical housewife with a 1950s feel about her as she fusses over two boys and her husband at the breakfast table. As they set off for the day, she waves goodbye to them and shouts into the wind, “I love you.” Nobody responds. The family never returns to the house, and for the first half of the film the camera follows Sweetheart around the property of the farm as she continues to do the everyday chores: collecting milk, making supper, doing housework, and eventually calling the police about her missing family.

Sweetheart is the first film made by BePhat Motel Productions, a group of five young South Africans who utilized their film production skills to create something that the screenwriter, Sean Drummond, says “would not take itself too seriously.” A self-funded film, Sweetheart was shot on a shoestring budget of R80,000 (approximately U.S.$7,933). The film is about a character who struggles with understanding herself as a mother and a wife, until she comes to the realization that she is neither. The director, Michael Matthews, emphasizes the fluidity of space and time and the meaning of being human, or being perceived as human, by juxtaposing the fragile woman with archetypal images of a mother, a priest, and a businessman, among other characters seen in the short duration of the film.

Because Sweetheart’s family never returns home, she decides to venture out in search of them. But before she does, she befriends a little white mouse. The mouse, in its quiet existence, is used as a device to show the extent of Sweetheart’s desperation to care for something, or perhaps, as becomes clearer toward the end of the film, to serve another creature. While the mouse highlights Sweetheart’s solitary existence sans family, the other characters she meets along the way to the city highlight the desolation and desertion of the larger geographical region and landscape. These characters all seem to be stuck in a time warp. Their robotic actions and reactions to the young woman are emphasized by the drab and destroyed places in which they find themselves. Besides the lonely characters who seem as confused as Sweetheart (or even a little mad), another important clue is offered to the viewer when Sweetheart looks up into a pink sky and sees jellyfish-like globules fluttering upward in slow motion according to the direction of the strong winds. Sweetheart watches them in a bewildered trance, and both she and the viewer are unsure of what to make of these indicators of change and movement.

Once Sweetheart reaches the city, she is amazed that it, too, is deserted. The eerie feeling of a quiet, desolate, and unpopulated city is established by long shots of downtown Cape Town CBD streets. These unusually...