Film Analysis: "Boesman and Lena" -- a Term Paper

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Film Analysis: "Boesman and Lena" -- a drama of ideas, not people

The central protagonists of Athol Fugard's drama "Boesman and Lena" have what turns out to be a nearly impossible life task. Not only, the drama suggests, must they struggle to survive having lost their home and community. To become emotionally whole again, the depressed Lena and controlling Boesman must find a way to reconstruct their previous relationship as man and wife, to find some emotional comfort in a place of desolation. Gradually, as Fugard's narrative evolves, it becomes clear to the viewer that this will not be possible, that the two are too broken by the oppressive web of the apartheid system to really recreate a loving partnership. However, it also becomes clear to the viewer of the filmed version of "Boesman and Lena" that the actors who play the protagonists in this drama of the South African playwright have an even more daunting task -- these actors cannot really convey these characters as fully human entities. Rather, Boesman and Lena, despite the emotional force of the acting evidenced in Danny Glover's and Angela Bassett's portrayals manage to exist only as symbols, not as fully developed human beings with complex feelings and relationships with one another.

It is hard to believe that the two angry, screaming characters on the beach and in the shantytown ever existed as husband and wife in anything approaching a loving partnership. The film is only an ineffectual rendering of what appears to be a dated play, and the film makes no effort to either update the feminine passivity of Lena for modern audiences or even to vary Fugard's sparse staging techniques for the more expansive canvas of cinema. True, when viewing the bleakness of the marriage, neither the film nor the play aimed to show Fugard's duo at their best. The play begins depicting Boesman and Lena as scavengers, left with nothing. This literal state of being stripped down to their barest essences mirrors their barren mutual emotional states, and the child they have lost. There is nothing left of either the man or the woman spiritually or emotionally, after so much has been taken away without cause.

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The only nod to the needs of cinema is shown as flashbacks convey scenes of the violent nature of the apartheid system, and how it can act to calcify the soul of those who suffer within its grasp. But this does not always excuse the level rage that the viewer sees between the couple, however pitiable their situation, such as when it is revealed that Boesman beat his wife out of rage for an act she did not even commit, much as both were beaten for no reason by the White rulers of the land. The political parallel may be intellectually clear in the mind of the viewer, but for the viewer, emotionally, this action cannot be justified, and it is hard to feel sympathy with Glover's character. Even Bassett's Lena, a self-justifying alcoholic who seems dependant on others, passive and depressed, seems to be more of a 'male' creation of a female symbol, than an actual woman in her reactions.

It might have been a better use of the flashback technique of film to not only show violence, but to show an array of the more positive aspects of the character's relationship, or positive aspects of their lives that have been destroyed or lost. Instead, determined to show horrors, the film chooses to focus purely on the violence of the past and how it plays out in the screaming, angry, and hollow violence of the present. It is only a depressing montage of hopeless struggle after hopelessness fight amongst characters who can salvage nothing, only rage, even though they had a child together and once, it is suggested, had a positive and fruitful marriage. The fact that so many Blacks did have hope during the apartheid era in South Africa, and even after the apartheid system ended many Blacks were able to show forgiveness to Whites, is simply forgotten and remains unexplained.….....

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