After walking out of the cinema, on Friday, seeing the highly anticipated movie, Black Butterflies, I was left with a hollowness in the feeling that the representation of one of South Africa’s biggest literary icons, Ingrid Jonker, was not balanced in this movie. It seems to have focussed purely on her personal battles instead of the artistic genius that she was. There was very few moments when the audience could grasp that this is the story of a professional, published writer. The movie portrait her almost as a confused child. The character of Ingrid portrayed in this film was not developed properly according to me. When looking at Ingrid’s personality it is clear that she was very diverse and there were moments when she lived passionately. The character in this movie only showed the depressed side of Ingrid that we are well aware of, but in fairness, I think that we should also show the world her other sides: the writer, the poet, the genius.
There was no mention of her absolute ear for language that Uys Krige often relayed upon in his translations. No mention of her contribution when she worked for Hiemstra on their dictionaries. The audience only gets the image of a girl who scribbles little irrelevant poems on walls and windows.
There was confusion about the Eugene Maritz character, obviously meant to represent Andre P Brink, but then Andre’s name gets mentioned later in the movie by Abraham Jonker. I also would have liked to see Marjorie Wallace next to Jan Rabie as I can only imagine that this would have been a superb character and could have lifted the mood of the movie all together. The English language also robbed the movie of authenticity and would have been better if produced in Afrikaans with English subtitles. Pieter Venter was in fact twenty years her senior and in the movie, the character looked her age. This was a crucial element for the audience to understand, maybe her search for a father figure etc. There are other errors of fact that I can point out like the portrayal of Three Anchor Bay as being a lavish beach etc. But let us not get into that. The main concern is the faulty image audiences would get of this brilliant woman.
The lack of depth in the Ingrid character could have been a result of the poor acting by Carice van Houten or the poor writing of the script. Regardless the reason I feel that Ingrid deserves more.
Regards,
Tinka Oberholzer