If
the Goonies grew up to splinter into two mortal enemy factions, it would be a
lot like what happens to the Five Fingers. They were inseparable during their
Apartheid-era childhood, but as adults, their interests and values diverged
drastically. It is all Tau’s fault, but he has finally come home to find some
redemption in Michael Matthews’ Five
Fingers for Marseilles (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
The
five lads used to have fun playing cowboys, but their innocence ended when two
crooked tax-collecting cops abducted their friend Lerato. The hot-headed Tau
saved her, but in the process, he killed two officers. For years, he lived on
the run as a modern-day highwayman, praying on desperately poor travelers who
can least afford it. After a prison stint, Tau resolves to live a quiet life,
if not necessarily a straight one. He returns to Marseilles (the other one),
finding it changed, yet still the same.
Pockets,
the well-heeled former Finger is now the Mayor and Cockroach is his brazenly
corrupt chief of police. Although Pockets talks a progressive game, it is clear
he and Cockroach have just picked up where the former government left off. Unathi,
the storyteller of the Fingers is now a priest, but watching his former friends
abuse their power has precipitated more crises of faith for him than what Ethan
Hawke experiences in First Reformed.
Maybe “Zulu” is the lucky one. He is not alive to witness the Fingers’ fall
from grace, but his dead-ringer son sees it all. Yet, as bad as Pockets and
Cockroach might be, there is a new gangster in town who is even worse. His archetypal
name is “Ghost” and he can immediately tell Tau will be bad for business.
At
just a whisker under two hours, Marseilles
runs long by any western/revisionist western/eastern western standard, but
it still provides several major characters only the scantest personality development.
However, it certainly gives western conventions a few clever twists, including Tau’s
ad-hoc reformation of the Five Fingers.
In
fact, some of the most interesting characters are those unlikely allies, particularly
“Honest John,” the drunken traveling salesman and Wei, the Chinese immigrant
shopkeeper Cockroach mercilessly extorts. Dean Fourie is so fabulously
flamboyant and debauched as Honest John, we’d humbly suggest his own spin-off
vehicle. Kenneth Fok is much more tightly restrained as Wei, but he really
gives the film some heart and soul.
Vuyo
Dabula has the right kind of imposing physical presence for Tau, but he only
has one performance setting: remorseful brooding. As Pockets, Kenneth Nkosi
seems to ooze greed and hypocrisy from every sweaty pore. Unfortunately, Hamilton
Dhlamini does not make much impact as Ghost, despite his considerable physical
size.
Cinematographer
Shaun Lee is definitely on-board giving the Eastern Cape landscape the Monument
Valley treatment. Granted, a tighter editorial hand would not have hurt the
film, especially during their early slingshot-wielding years, but isn’t that always
the case? However, you have to give Matthews and screenwriter Sean Drummond
credit for their meet-the-new-boss-not-nearly-different-enough-from-the-old-boss
honesty. Recommended as a sweepingly tragic South African take on the Western
genre, a “Bobotie Western,” Five Fingers
for Marseilles opens this Friday (9/7) in New York, at the Cinema Village.
