Poetry, politics, madness, and desire collide in the true story of the woman hailed as South Africa's Sylvia Plath. In 1960s Cape Town, as Apartheid steals the expressive rights of blacks and whites alike, young Ingrid Jonker (Carice van Houten) finds her freedom scrawling verse while frittering through a series of stormy affairs. Amid escalating quarrels with her lovers and her rigid father, a parliament censorship minister (Rutger Hauer), the poet witnesses an unconscionable event that will alter the course of both her artistic and personal lives. -- (C) Tribeca.The life of poet Ingrid Jonker, whose short but intense existence would later make her known as the “South African Sylvia Plath,†is given the polished biopic treatment in Paula van der Oest’s Black Butterflies. Conventional yet captivating thanks in large part to a terrific lead performance from Carice van Houten (Black Book), the film should see broad arthouse play after nabbing prizes in Tribeca and Taormina.
Jonker (van Houten) committed suicide in 1965 at the age of 31, leaving behind her a collection of Afrikaans-language poems, one of which (“Die Kindâ€) was read by Nelson Mandela during his opening address to the first South African democratic parliament. Although her poetry was often more personal than political, it reflected many of her fellow writers’ (who formed a group known as “Die Sestigersâ€) opposition to the apartheid regime in place. This sentiment was further complicated (and magnified) by the fact that Jonker’s father, Abraham (Rutger Hauer), was a Member of Parliament responsible for censoring books like those written by his daughter.Retracing Jonker’s story from the time she leaves her first husband to settle down in Cape Town up until her death around five years later, the script by Greg Latter (Goodbye Bafana) focuses predominantly on the poet’s troubled ties with her dad, and her turbulent love affair with Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham), a swarthy novelist who was twenty years her senior. In the second instance, what begins as amour fousoon enough shifts to the fouside, as the ever-unsatisfied Ingrid is unable to remain in a monogamous couple, and following an abortion is interned for severe depression.Watch Black Butterflies Movie Online
If Jack is never depicted as the key to her heart, he and writer Ulys Krige (Graham Clarke) open up Ingrid’s vision to the suffering of South Africa’s black population, who are quartered in ghettos where they cannot leave without an official pass. When Ingrid witnesses the death of a little boy at the hands of government police, it prompts her to write “Die Kind,†whose first line, “The child is not dead,†reveals how well she could marry social commentary with expressive language. Assembled into the collection “Smoke and Ochre,†the poem puts an end to Ingrid’s relationship with her father, causing her to slide further into a funk from which she’ll never recover.More or less chronologically told, the narrative jumps systematically from Ingrid’s tumultuous lifestyle to writing scenes where she literally scribbles her thoughts on the walls, and like many a biopic of an author it attempts to show how her work resulted from personal experience. Although such a choice is rather obvious and never really does justice to the poems themselves, van Houten so well embodies the seductive madness of her character that the film remains altogether engrossing. Hauer provides a powerfully restrained turn as Abraham. Even if the scenes between he and van Houten are unfortunately limited, they’re filled with sheer emotional energy.
Directing with a smooth academic style, van der Oest (the Oscar-nominated Zus & zo) faithfully depicts the sights and scents of 1960s Cape Town, where Ingrid indulges in plenty of champagne and frolicking before becoming aware of the disturbing world around her. Superb widescreen cinematography by Giulio Biccari (The Breed) jumps between hot to cool colors, reflecting the poet’s changing moods as well as her many evocations of sea and sun.South African poet Ingrid Jonker was an absent mother, a faithless lover, a thankless daughter, and a vicious drunk. At least, that’s the portrait that emerges from Paula van der Oest and Greg Latter’s filmed bio. Transferring the life of a writer to the screen is never easy, since a truthful portrait would involve endless mind-numbing hours staring at an expanse of white space, but Black Butterflies scarcely tries to illuminate the substance of Jonker’s writing.At least Black Butterflies gets the tortured-soul part right. The film opens with Ingrid (Carice van Houten), caught in a riptide, being pulled to shore by South African novelist Jack Cope (Liam Cunningham), an ironic allusion to her suicide by drowning at age 32. Although her father (Rutger Hauer) is a right-wing writer and politician, she’s moved by the injustices of apartheid, which soon enters her poetry. When she and Cope see white soldiers fire into a crowd of unarmed blacks, she puts the death of a child into verse, handing the poem to her father as if he might somehow approve, or even be converted. Instead, he tears up the paper. She touches her temple and says, “Don’t worry. I’ve got it all in here.â€Watch Black Butterflies Movie Online
In spite of her father’s rank bigotry, Ingrid often seems like a petulant child when she’s opposing him, in part due to the shallowness of van Houten’s performance. She commits to the role, throwing herself to the floor to suck liquor from the shards of a broken bottle, but never connects. A viewer without foreknowledge of the movie’s subject might go some time without realizing Ingrid is meant to be the protagonist, since Cunningham’s performance is so much more charismatic.Black Butterflies succeeds, at least, in dramatizing the horrors of apartheid, which take root more forcefully than the drama of its ostensible protagonist. When Nelson Mandela gave his address to the first South African Parliament, he read Jonker’s poem “The Child Who Was Shot Dead By Soldiers In Nyanga,†which ends, “The child who became a giant travels through the whole world / without a pass.†The movie never musters anything as powerful as those lines.
