With regurgitated tropes, such as the ex-con trying to make good, “Four Corners” makes for a good product but not a great film, writes Roger Young.
Ian Gabriel’s Four Corners is beautifully photographed by Vicci Turpin. The attention to the details of the Cape Flats, the way the camera occasionally ever so slightly pauses on a doorway, a rooftop, an out of focus figure in the crumbling streets of the ghetto, coupled with the perfect capturing of the grey light that hangs in those grim streets, away from the sunshine, the mountain in the unattainable distance that lends an authenticity to a script so sadly littered with tropes: the ex-con trying to make good and having to do one more job; the woman who returns from overseas; the boy who has to choose between chess or being a gangster; the serial killer that stalks the ghetto preying on young children.
That the film is largely in Sabela (the once secret prison language of the numbers gangs) and that a large majority of the bit parts and extras are non-professional performers, further lends to the very realness of the project. Of an early, and viscerally captured prison mess hall fight scene, Gabriel says, “everyone was an ex-prisoner or an ex-gangster or an ex-addict or a continuing addict”.
It is the intersection of these elements, the authentic and the regurgitated tropes, which make Four Corners a success as a product, and not as a great film. It is the very lack of aspiration to some kind of high art, while rooting itself in authenticity, coupled with the films success as a product (that is – people are watching it), that makes Gabriel’s film feel like a ray of light through the clouds of Hartiwood Film-formula flicks and the continued good fortune of Leon Schuster.
Before Four Corners premiered last week, it had appeared on the streets in pirated form and then as a torrent, which was widely downloaded. Gabriel is incredibly philosophical about this, “I think the way people think now – digitally – they don’t see it as piracy, they see it as sharing. We will definitely not get as many people to the cinemas as we would have if the film were not pirated. At the same time, there are people who have seen the film who would never have got to the cinema.
“A lot of the Facebook and Twitter talk, is largely from people who have already viewed the pirated copies. We are pushing ‘better on the big screen’ to counter the piracy, but we are yet to know if we will get the same audience into the cinema.”
Bridge between two worlds
After the weekend’s release on 20 screens nationwide, Helen Kuhn of Indigenous, the film’s distributor, said that with the figures they had so far, “Four Corners is on 92% of the per print high estimate for its opening weekend, and will be very close to 100% [when the other figures come in].”
For full review go to Mail & Guardian
