Heightened Fragilities

“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.” — J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2004)

Dust is a French-Belgian production directed by Marion Hänsel (also French-Belgian, 1949–2020) in the mid-1980s, during perhaps the Apartheid regime’s most severe decade and also the time when resistance to it was strongest. It would be reasonable for us to think that audiences in the “West”, and the European investors who had them in mind, were susceptible to themes connected directly or indirectly to South African politics. Hänsel’s film is based on a 1977 story by J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940), the controversial South African writer (2003 Nobel Prize for Literature) who had written the novel with a film adaptation in mind. Curiously, it was shot in Spain and its leading role was taken by the English-French actor Jane Birkin (1946–2023). Birkin’s beauty and daring had made her famous a decade earlier, alongside Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), and her hippie-chic aura had led to her name being used by Hermès for their luxury Birkin Handbag, a year before this film was released. Dust won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and Birkin’s fragile, disturbed performance was rightly acknowledged as one of the best of the year. And it is to see Birkin that we still come to the cinema today, right?

It is possible, as an exercise, to look at this film as a reproduction of an abyssal world, which the story it tells seems to want to dismantle. Without that exercise, however, none of this has anything to do with South Africa, or Apartheid, or the struggle that brought it crashing down. Rather, it has everything to do with cinema as an extractivist entertainment industry, drawing on the ills of the world in order to feed our desires and democratic illusions, while sweeping critical awareness and civic duty under the carpet. Dust is a film about family relationships, desire, sex and death, but it can also be read as an unfinished portrait of colonial psychosis.

To begin with, the domestic choreography executed by the characters in Dust may seem improper for the space in which the action unfurls. However, as we come to see, their gestures, meticulously tuned over time, are vital for the survival of the group that enacts them. The landscape’s inhospitable and seemingly unchanging severity is overcome only by rigorous observation of a spartan discipline, marked as much by unquestioned codes regarding gender and race as it is by the clock on the wall, which Magda (Jane Birkin) must wind up every day. As such, the film’s first images locate the action on a farm as vast as it is remote, in the arid, deserted region of Karoo, South Africa, while simultaneously throwing us into the intimacy of the farmhouse and Magda’s inner world. Marion Hänsel’s adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s novella In the Heart of the Country (1977) is a film seen through the solitary, delirious gaze of the repressed Magda, as she looks out at the world around her.

This unreliable narrator lives with her father (Trevor Howards, 1913–1988), a strict and overbearing widower. We understand that Magda has a fertile, violent imagination when she sees her father arrive at the house on a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by a young wife. Disconcerted by this event, Magda goes into the nuptial bedroom and attacks her father with an axe. It is made clear, however, that this bloody and brutal patricide never took place, nor did the marriage; yet this violent fantasy is prophetic.

When Hendrick (John Matshikiza, 1954–2008) asks if his wife Anna (Nadine Uwampa, dates unknown) can join him as an employee of the household, Magda accepts, while, at the same time, giving the young woman a new name, re-baptising her, arguing that there is already a maid called Anna in the house. This abuse (as a symbolic example of all abuse), enacted with discipline, will come at a price. Underneath all the subsequent plot there is racial envy, characterised by the desire both to possess attributes of the Black Other and to destroy it, because it represents something absent from the (white) Self. In the conceptual universe of the farm, the Black subject becomes an object of desire that must simultaneously be attacked and destroyed as a person. As the film unsettlingly blends reality and fantasy, the domestic routine is interrupted (undoing the choreography), family ties are twisted, the roles of master and servant are momentarily reversed, and the colonial lie — hateful, psychotic — collapses.

This splintered world, emerging from the fall of the prevailing order, cannot survive. As the film progresses, Magda’s delirious monologues gradually leave the protection of the house’s more secluded corners, and the initial claustrophobia is joined by an ever-growing physical and mental fragility. The landscape’s vastness never undermines the feeling of enclosure. The film ends with Magda completely isolated on the farm, ever closer to madness. In the absence of the structures that always supported her life, this woman is unable to carry out basic tasks, and not even the animals obey her. In the final sequence, Magda is back with her father again. We briefly entertain the hypothesis that everything was just a dream and, of course, it might well have been. However, a new fragility, heighted by the old man’s white hair and the careful way he listens to his daughter’s childhood recollections — including stories of journeys to the coast — suggests that this moment is the dream.

The colonial enterprise creates a mental disturbance that makes it difficult to separate what is real and what isn’t, in what is called psychosis, and which affects coloniser and colonised in different ways. Unlike J. M. Coetzee’s book, Dust, by Marion Hänsel, risks being read solely as a film about an unloved woman’s mental fragility. This reading, perhaps unfair and superficial, is possible because Hänsel pushes to the side the brutal events and complex feelings underlying the behaviour of all the characters.