Teeth Bared
by Gavin Smith
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Dir. Embeth Davidtz, South Africa, Sony Pictures Classics
There once was a country called Rhodesia, sandwiched between South Africa and Zambia. Formerly a British colony, it became an independent nation in 1963, under the government of Prime Minister Ian Smith, who was elected by the country’s just-over-one-percent white inhabitants. The other 98 percent had no say. Under pressure partly from international sanctions but mainly by the bitterly fought insurgency of a Black guerilla resistance, Rhodesia, aka Zimbabwe, finally had no choice but to hold a free and fair election in 1980. Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister and Zimbabwe became the country’s official name. In due course, the country’s fertile farmlands were transferred from white ownership to Black. Many of the one percent duly cleared out.
Was Rhodesia’s form and enforcement of apartheid less virulent than that of South Africa? On the face of it, it’s hard to make that call in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. It’s told from within the world of a cattle-farming white family, and further restricts its point of view by filtering the action through the eyes and voiceover of the film’s protagonist, an eight-year-old girl named Bobo. Onscreen for the film’s entire 99 minutes, Lexi Venter plays Bobo in a disarmingly direct, uninhibited performance that elevates her in the cinematic pantheon of child actors.
“Am I African?” Bobo asks her mother. “No… It’s complicated” comes the response. “Are we racists?” she asks during a visit to her grandparents, who live in town. “Certainly not,” mum firmly replies. “Where would you get that idea?” (Grandma adds, “We have breeding, which is better than having money.”) But all of this is contradicted in nearly every interaction between the child and the family’s servants, the stern but at times affectionate Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and the dour Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana). A virtually nonstop succession of small, often semi-oblivious humiliations and high-handed bossing—“I could fire you if I want,” Bobo tells Jacob at one point—fully register the child’s casual and unreflective attitude towards the two Black people she encounters on a daily basis. In this she is propogating the low-intensity racism of her family, especially her mum’s. Even when Bobo plays with Black children, she treats them like servants. She only truly comes face to face with the otherness of Black resistance for the first time when she peers through a slit at an incarcerated “terrorist” who looks back at her before withdrawing into the darkness.
In many respects, the realities of the not-so-distant Bush War, brought close up by the news reports on the family’s television, make Bobo a rather worldly “innocent”—after all, mum clutches an Uzi like a teddy bear while she sleeps. Bobo’s first words in the film ponder the threat of “terrorists,” and while dad assembles his rifle at the breakfast table in preparation for a military tour of duty, she loads his magazine with ammunition and toys with a hand grenade (having stolen his cigarettes). She is au fait with landmines and “commies” and on the convoy into town remarks “I really hope we don’t die in an ambush today.” She knows much more about death than your average eight-year-old. Following the childlike handwritten credits sequence Bobo visits the grave of a Black baby and describes what Sarah has told her about the difference between white and Black funeral customs. Here is the first mention of the death of her younger sister, a defining backstory in the family’s life that gradually unfurls. “That was when mum was still happy” Bobo observes.
In her 2001 memoir, upon which the film is based, Alexandra Fuller describes her mother, Linda, as “hard-living, glamorous, intemperate, intelligent, racist.” As played by the film’s writer-director Embeth Davidtz, she’s all that and then some. Formidable, brusque, no-nonsense, and soon teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown before tumbling headlong into one, she is the film’s irresistible, volatile center of gravity. “Sorry for the mess, can you bring me my tea now?” she remarks offhandedly, after shooting a snake that has found its way into the family house. Such refreshing nonchalance rapidly gives way to alcohol-fueled acting out as the electoral defeat of the white minority sinks in. “She’ll fight for the farm with her bare hands,” notes Bobo, adding, in a whisper, “I believe her.”
Davidtz’s performance is fearless and spectacular, plumbing the depths of an incandescent character. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a passion project of the best kind, and not just because it features a part actors would give their right arm to play. Davidtz was born in the U.S. and relocated to South Africa at age eight. Fuller’s memoir must have seemed like a natural means to reckon with a childhood lived under the specter of apartheid, and her adaptation of the Fuller family’s chronicle is exemplary, distilling the first third of the book and setting aside the family’s subsequent experiences in Malawi and Zambia. The result is a trenchant depiction of the daily realities of apartheid from a white perspective and the colonial mindset in all its contradictions, something that has seldom reached the screen since the honorable efforts of Cry Freedom (1987) and A World Apart (1988).
Davidtz works wonders with the environment of the film, which teems with animal life and is enriched by a densely textured sound design. She also knows when to cut and never dwells long on any scene or shot. From the film’s opening tracking shot into and around the Fuller’s house in the dead of night, Davidtz also establishes a quiet sense of tension that’s firmly held in check and then periodically jolted—by fleeting glints of reflected sunlight in the distant hills and corresponding night-time binocular views of the farm. Those binocular shots in turn call back to the singular blurred POV images (one at the film’s very end) taken from within Bobo’s squinting eyes, striated with eyelashes. These two opposing orders of visual perception might be where the film’s highly subjective articulation comes up against the hard facts of historical events. And just before the end of the film, there’s another telling, more legible reciprocation. As the family departs in their Land Rover, Jacob raises his fist in a Black Power salute—and Bobo responds by raising hers.