A Must See Movie This Summer

Cape Town Gets Bizet
A film version of Carmen explores post-apartheid South Africa
By Richard Poplak
July 27, 2006

“Through surgery we must create order” reads an ominous 1976 South African governmental report on “matters relating to the coloured population group.” Four years later, due to the so-called Surgical Method, entire communities were forcibly removed from their homes and dumped on a piece of ground 30 kilometres from Cape Town, in a barren stretch called the Cape Flats. This place was given a Xhosa name: Khayelitsha, or “new home.” As township violence elsewhere in the country spiraled out of control, hundreds and thousands fled to the Flats, bringing their troubles with them. Shacks were built upon shacks; multicoloured corrugated iron structures bloomed from the hardscrabble streets. When the apartheid regime ended in 1994, the Flats was home to more than half a million people, most without basic services, almost all without hope. Khayelitsha is a scar upon the land, a legacy of the apartheid era that is still, 12 years later, a contusion that refuses to heal.

In the midst of this teeming, roiling mess, we find the film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, the winner of the Golden Bear at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. Director Mark Dornford-May and his Dimpho Di Kopane theatre company have wrenched Georges Bizet’s 19th-century opera staple from the safety of the concert hall and dumped it into the grit of a shantytown. For the uninitiated few, Bizet’s opera tells the tale of a fiery Spanish cigarette girl who ignites the male tinder around her to explosive effect. Brooding prison guard Jose, promised to another woman, is drawn to the titular anti-heroine. When he is passed over for a dashing matador, things take a slide towards the nasty.

Opera-to-film adaptation aficionados — a decidedly small niche — will find much to ponder in this production, not least of which is the omission of Bizet’s “greatest hit”: Toreador Song. Indeed, the film prompts the question: how much can you bend an opera before it breaks?

Dornford-May, a British ex-pat now based in the Cape, has long been an opera bender. In 2000, after cutting his teeth at the popular London-based Broomhill Opera, he was asked to start an all-black opera outfit in South Africa. The results have been, for the most part, spectacular. Culling Dimpho Di Kopane’s 32 performers from thousands of township and rural hopefuls, he has amassed a formidable troupe. Before it was envisioned as a film, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was developed as a stage opera in Cape Town and then travelled to London and beyond. Reviews were uniformly ecstatic.

When the U-Carmen crew buzzed through Toronto for a series of performances at the Elgin Theatre in 2003, I was lucky to catch a show. The performance bustled with plus-sized performers singing with plus-sized voices, all whipping the tale along at a furious pace. The libretto, translated into Xhosa — with its mellifluous clicks and clucks, the linguistic equivalent of driving a sports car with the handbrake on — worked with nary a hitch. This iteration of Carmen (played by Pauline Malefane) was more slattern than sultry, more sassy than subtle. With furious gravitational impetus, she and Jongi (Andile Tshoni) — the renamed Jose character — were drawn to one another like a planet dashing into its moon.

The film, sadly, is nowhere near as successful. But as far as experiments go, it’s fascinating. Dornford-May is not yet a filmmaker; his mise en scène is awkward, his pacing drags, his staging is klutzy. He doesn’t have the chops to reconcile the clamour of township life with the burnished elegance of Bizet’s score. The verité-style photography, although excellent in depicting a township “city symphony,” feels silly in the context of an opera adaptation. The effect is like characters in a documentary breaking into song, backed by a full orchestra. The standard European instrumentation also feels odd — why did Dornford-May and musical director Charles Hazelwood choose not to include some indigenous touches? There are two films here, and they don’t coalesce.

There is, however, one compelling reason to see this film: Pauline Malefane’s interpretation of opera’s infamous femme fatale is a thrill ride. This is not a Carmen you’ll see on the cover of a woman’s fashion magazine any time soon. She’s heavy and sweaty, her face acne-scarred, her eyes like slate, her hair straightened far too often. But there is a strange Asiatic beauty about her; her sexuality feels dangerous. When she says, “If you love me, you’d best beware,” she means it. Her voice, too, is steely, unrefined yet somehow gorgeous. It’s an astonishingly brave performance, and it is a credit to Dornford-May that he did not compromise on casting his stage company in the film. These are not, by movie-making standards, conventionally beautiful people — they look hard and battle-worn. They look like the people of Khayelitsha.

That’s where this Carmen mines its tragedy. Malefane’s Carmen is brazen because she has to be. When she agrees to trade sex with Jongi’s commander for freedom, we understand the notion of her body as a commodity: in Khayelitsha, you sell what you have. Her decisions — and her ice-cold heart — are the product of an environment that consumes the weak. But, as she learns all too late, it consumes the strong as well. Khayelitsha does not bother with such Darwinian distinctions.

In the film, a series of expository flashbacks tell us that Carmen and Jongi are both originally from rural areas. They, like so many black South Africans, were drawn to urban life because rural life had nothing to offer. The city, of course, could offer little more. During apartheid, South Africa’s blacks were forbidden from living in urban areas by the Group Areas Act, which gave rise to places like Khayelitsha on the periphery of cities. Today, economic circumstances still keep the bulk of the black population in the townships. Thus, Carmen and Jongi’s destructive attraction serves as a stirring metaphor for the brutality of the apartheid era. Drawn to the flicker of bright lights, hundreds of thousands of souls were destroyed.

Dornford-May has bent Bizet’s great opera, and occasionally he breaks it. But U-Carmen eKhayelitsha remains a powerful portrait of life in South Africa’s townships. Like Tsotsi, last year’s Academy Award winner for best foreign film, it allows us a glimpse into the legacy of one of the 20th century’s more ignominious regimes.

Township life is, thankfully, changing. South Africa’s current African National Congress government is pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure and housing in problem areas. In Soweto, real estate is suddenly a hot commodity, and Bimmers and bling are as likely a sight as shoeless street urchins. A byproduct of this economic rebirth is the emergence of a cultural renewal — clubs and galleries and theatres are springing up where there were once only shacks and squalid drinking holes. Perhaps, in the near future, we can expect a Soweto or Khayelitsha opera house. If so, with U-Carmen, Dornford-May and his talented company have provided a stirring opening movement in what could become a powerful aria: music as balm, opera as hope.

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha opens July 28 in Toronto.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. His first book, Ja, No, Man!: Growing Up White in Apartheid-Era South Africa, will be published by Penguin in 2007.

I Won a Trip to the Bahamas!

Toiling away in front of my computer, my head full of numbers, my reaction was not quite as enthusisatic as the young man had anticipated when he broke the news to me.

"You have won the St. Patrick's Day Free Trip to the Bahamas Draw!" he jubilantly exclaimed.
"Oh, that's nice", I responded.

For the next half hour he proceeded to list all the things I had won, where I would go, and how many stars each hotel had. He even told me my prize included one other person. So, I could take my boyfriend (My who?).

All I had to do was to pay a 399$ promotional fee for each person going. And I could easily charge it right then and there to my Visa. I could even sell the trip afterwards if I decided not to go.

According to the Better Business Bureau, this is all legal. It is a way companies (such as this one Green-Blue Promotions) get rid of the last remaining seats on package tours. There is always 'just one more thing' to pay. For example, the plane ticket to Florida, from where the cruise was to depart was never mentioned. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. That extra night, between when the cruise docks in the Bahamas and when the free **** hotel picks up.

For the first time in my life I won something. And I turned it down.

Women Still Make Less $ Than Men. No, really?

Women still earning less than men, says StatsCan
Tue, 07 Mar 2006
www.cbc.ca/news

Canadian women are still earning less than men in the workplace, an earning gap that hasn't shifted much in the past decade, suggests a new study from Statistics Canada.

Released on Tuesday, the report shows the number of women in the workforce is on the rise. Women made up 47 per cent of the employed work force in 2004, up from 37 per cent in 1976.

But the report indicates women are earning less in those jobs.

For all employed women in 2003, including those in part time and seasonal jobs, the average earnings were slightly under $25,000, compared to the roughly $39,000 average for all men with jobs.

Women working full-time jobs in 2003 had an average salary of $36,500 – 71 per cent of what their male counterparts earned. That gap hasn't changed much in the past 10 years, the study found.

Women are also more likely to work in part-time jobs than men.

"Women currently account for about 70 per cent of all part-time employees, a figure which has not changed appreciably since the mid-1970s," said the report.

Low-income single women outnumber male counterparts

The study also suggests single women and women who are single parents are more likely to live in low-income situations than their male counterparts.

In 2003, 31 per cent of unattached women older than 16 lived in low-income situations with average earnings of $28,000. That compares to an average earning of $34,000 for men in the same situation.

When it comes to single parent families, 38 per cent of families headed by a woman were low income. That compares to 13 per cent for male lone-parent families and seven per cent for two-parent families.

"As a result, lone-parent families headed by women continue to be home to a disproportionate share of all children living in a low-income situation," said the report.

Living like a flamenca in Jerez!

It is the season of the annual pilgrimage to Jerez and the rest of Spain for flamenco aficionados. My friend Edie (of Edie's Hat Shop) has set up a neat blog journaling her experiences of 'firsts' as a 'flamenco pilgrim'. Check it out:

http://edietravel.blogspot.com/

Feeling Lost Sometimes?

Lost whale having terrible time in the Thames

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:53:43 EST
CBC News website www.cbc.ca/news

Londoners crowded along the River Thames on Friday to catch a rare glimpse of a large whale swimming past Parliament and Big Ben.

Measuring about five to six metres, the northern bottlenose whale swam under Westminster Bridge, coming close to the banks of the Thames. Followed closely by a police boat, the whale nearly beached itself and appeared to get stuck a couple of times.

Rescue officials rushed to push the seven-tonne mammal into deeper water as television crews broadcast the events on television.

Marine experts speculated the whale was lost or ill and became confused.

Vets remained on standby as emergency workers waited for special equipment to try to redirect the whale downstream in the tidal waterway. The whale already cut itself and bled after crashing into an empty boat, said a BBC report.

This type of whale is usually found in cold, deep North Atlantic water and rarely ventures into the English Channel. London's Natural History Museum said it's the first instance of a northern bottlenose in the river since 1913.