Paul Eilers’ Verraaiers is a long film. At two hours, it feels like three. This Bosbok Ses production is overall a more merit worthy experience than Roepman, their previous film I liked but a film I found to be too whimsical and spiritually thin for its own good. Verraaiers is, for better and for worse, a more grounded experience, an exploration of loyalty and betrayal against the backdrop of the South African War (Anglo-Boer War).
At the centre of events is Jacobus van Aswegen (a strong Gys de Villiers), who with his sons – including Vilje Maritz – fight the British until he starts to question the wisdom of their involvement in the conflict. With the implementation of Kitchener’s scorched earth policy, whereby farms were burned down and women and children taken to concentration camps, Van Aswegen decides to rather stay at home with his wife (Rika Sennett) and daughters (including Roepman’s Beate Olwagen) so that he can be there to protect them if necessary. This decision is seen as betrayal by some of the Boer authorities and before long Jacobus and his kin (and some friends) are arrested and set to stand trial on charges of treason.
The first part of the film is the narrative and thematic set-up and provides a clear idea of why some Boers decided to personally withdraw from the war even if they supported the effort as a whole. The second part of the film concerns the trial, and is a complete slog to sit through. When the trial-part of the film begins, the film has nothing else to focus on, no B-storyline to alternate with the trial-storyline. So, for nearly an hour we see the men worry, talk to the Boer authorities, question themselves and so on. There are some cutaways to the women all alone at the homestead, but those quickly become pointless due to a specifically bizarre scene which suggests something completely unconvincing about the Boer women in question, particularly the mother.
Then we’re back with the men who sit and toil and wonder their way to an unsurprising ending. Half the film is thus claustrophobic and constraining without visual reference to whatever else is happening while the protagonists are imprisoned – why are we not shown the scorched earth policy in practice? – and the film grinds to a halt. In films such as Der Untergang (Downfall) such characteristics – claustrophobia; constraint; a focus on a specific small group of characters – were beneficial in sustaining suspense and a sense of foreboding, but in Verraaiers their sum total is tedium. There’s something in the combination of shot selection, editing and the screenplay that severely undermines the film, something I hope will become clearer to me in a second or third viewing (which I’m not looking forward to, given how leaden half of the film is).
Johan Baird and Stian Bam are solid in important supporting roles, but there are odd character moments that don’t convince, such as an early scene with Carel Trichardt as a judge wondering aloud (as if on stage) about loyalty and betrayal, somewhat clumsily foregrounding the film’s themes. Yet it’s the pacing that remains the biggest problem. I’ve seen war films that go on for three hours; I’ve seen hour upon hour of Tarr and Tarkovsky and am all the better for it. Those films, regardless of their running time, have a poetry to their images that is undeniable, and often, to me personally, unshakeable. Maybe that’s why Verraaiers felt so long and seemed so lifeless as it continued: it is so sincere, so focused on representing history in a functional and visually instrumental manner, that, to its detriment, it fundamentally lacks a sense of imagistic poetry.
