There are three scenes from the Kurt Darren starring romantic drama Ek Lief Jou that I will use as keys to discuss the film. I can state up front that the film is badly written and shoddily executed, and unless you’re interested in minor curiosities of contemporary South African cinema, it is best avoided.
Darren stars as Dirk, a South African singer making it big in Belgium where he promotes a competition for women where the winner will star opposite him in his latest music video. As evidence that films seldom know what journalists really do, a hot reporter, Anna (Ilse de Vis) is assigned to travel to South Africa and to cover the competition. She’s also supposed to find some dirt on Dirk to find a ‘real’ story, something scandalous that her boss (director Ate de Jong) will approve of. Allow me to propose a drinking game: every time Anna says, “I’m a journalist, that’s what I do!”, take a shot. It will improve the viewing experience considerably, and raise it from “unbearable” to just “terrible”.
It makes sense that we expect Anna and Dirk to fall in love somewhere along the line. What doesn’t make sense if why Dirk, who is devoid of personality but seems like a nice enough (if dim) guy, would be in a relationship with a capitalist succubus played by (former?) model Christina Storm. Also present is Andre Frauenstein, who played Goku in Eternity and now has two dreadful movies under his belt in which he co-stars with Storm.
Scene 1: The Non-existent Waterfall
Much of the film is set in a game lodge in Limpopo. At one stage, the characters take to the dirt roads on bicycles, and that’s how Dirk and Anna end up at a nearby waterfall, or as I refer to it, “the small stream spilling over the edge of a hill”. The filmmakers shoot the poor waterfall as if it’s the most irrelevant waterfall in the history of cinema: a small, unimpressive spot in a background so smoothed out and graded during postproduction that the entire background of trees, water and earth blend together like a failed watercolour experiment. It looks like a deleted scene from What Dreams May Come 2: Lovin' Limpopo.
Scene 2: A Boy and His Bottle
Storm’s character Lisa Snyders and Dirk’s brother Danie have a strange relationship best explained by the psycho-dynamics of sado-masochism. Maybe because she is Dirk’s manager, little brother is willing to act submissive towards Lisa – but only to a point. While at the lodge, Lisa requests some sherry. Danie is initially reluctant to fetch her some but ends up liberating an entire bottle from the bar. He is then witness to something he was not supposed to see that involves Lisa, and to punish her pours out some of the alcohol only to fill the bottle up again with his own urine. He offers some to Lisa, but we know that he doesn’t know that she saw him pee in the sherry. She invites him to help himself to a drink, and watches him gulp down his own piss. It’s a long, bizarre scene, made even stranger by the fact that Danie has to pull his pants down to his knees to enable the bottle-filling to occur. This leads to repeated shots of Frauenstein’s rear, so much so that I began to apprehensively anticipate a reverse full frontal. We were spared that, but not the consumption of urine.
Scene 3: The Exposed
All the main characters and some secondary ones are involved in a playful touch rugby match. Lisa does not like the fact that Anna seems to have developed a crush on Dirk, and during the game she does something to distract everyone from the Belgian journalist (“It’s what I do!”). In the midst of a line-up, as she is lifted high in the air to catch the ball, Lisa instead pulls down her blouse low enough to flash both breasts. This isn’t just a cleavage moment; for a second, you’re squaring off with the Storm nipples. It’s cheap and gratuitous, an ill-intentioned stunt that was never going to work cinematically, and provides a useful key to the film: Ek Lief Jou forces one badly written, unbearable scene after the other onto you to the point where you cannot believe what you’re seeing, and then you look away disgusted. You look away.
Ek Lief Jou is a very bad movie, and its title phrase (a low level version of "I love you") is never even used in the film. Nor do we see, for that matter, the music video that the film uses in its premise. Indeed, much in the film is outside the frame, such as some off-screen hyenas that just fuel an already awful performance from Storm as she pretend-panics and pretend-throws rocks at them. Ek Lief Jou tries so hard to be sweet and romantic, and De Vis is likeable enough as a female interest, but in the end there’s not enough liquor (urine-infused or not) in the world to make Ek Lief Jou’s degenerate and undercooked attempts at humour palatable.
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