Cape Town Gets Bizet

The heat on the street: A shantytown near Cape Town, South Africa is the setting for Mark Dornford-May's film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

“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.

Carmen electrifying: Pauline Malefane plays Carmensitha, a passionate cigarette factory worker. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

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.

A woman spurned: Nomakhaya (Lungelwa Blou, left) is the fiancé of a police officer seduced by Carmensitha. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

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.

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