I had my “African period” once, when it was so near. Five years, 1979-84, and save for a month in Morocco (which some might say does not count) in 1990, I have not been back…save by books. More recently I’ve read books by Africans themselves, like Moses Isegawa and Alain Mabanckou. In the “African period” I read mainly books by those of European descent. There were those by males, Alan Paton, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Ernest Hemingway. It was three women however who helped put the “awe” into my appreciation for Africa. Each got some dirt under their fingernails – they were farmers. Each inspired visits with words of their experiences. Olive Schreiner wrote “The Story of an African Farm.” Elspeth Huxley wrote “The Flame Trees of Thika.” And Karen Blixen, under the pen name, Isak Dinesen, wrote “Out of Africa,” which was first published in 1937 and commenced with the subject line.
Sidney Pollack directed the movie, which was released in 1985. Two big-named Hollywood stars, Meryl Streep, who played Baroness Blixen and Robert Redford, with his perpetually perplexed expression, played the independent English hunter, Denys Finch Hatton, who would eventually become the paramour of Blixen. Klaus Maria Brandauer, played Blixen’s philandering husband, who gifted her with some syphilis, back in the pre-antibiotic days when the poison, mercury, was the treatment, which worked in Blixen’s case. The two were eventually divorced. And Africa, well, it played itself and Pollack has his camerapersons reinforce the “awe.”
Can watching a movie that sorta glorified the colonial period be “politically correct” nowadays? Well, at one level, I don’t care, but I think that Pollack did a good job of showing a lot of the warts, shorn of the glory. Blixen, for example, is not allowed into the men’s only club. And as she must have done in real life, she did go to considerable lengths to ensure that the natives were given a better deal, on land that was once theirs, as she dramatically states on her knees.
I liked watching the interactions between Streep and Redford, depicting relationships from the days when, as Bob Dylan once sung, in “Tom Thumb’s Blues”: “And you try not to go to her too soon.” Best to make sure you wait at least an hour, sometimes a metaphorical one. And I loved the scene of confrontation between Blixen’s husband and Denys when the former said: “You might have asked, Denys.” Redford comes back with: “I did, and she said Yes.”
Furthering the realism, shorn of the glory, as Marguerite Duras attested, in far off Indochine, many colonists were far from wealthy and lead rather hardscrabble existences. The one off-note in the film was the impressive stone home the Blixens lived in, almost certainly much better than the initial homes built before 1913. As Huxley says of her experience: we built a house of grass and ate off a damask cloth spread between packing cases. As for Blixen, assorted disasters on the farm eventually forced her to return to Denmark, in 1931, destitute.
A good movie that evoked a bit of nostalgia for my own experiences of four decades ago, and a yearning to return to the continent. Algeria might be a good start, even though some might say that doesn’t count either. 5-stars for Africa, the awe, and a couple very good actors.
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Reviews with images
Where half of my heart stays
I watch this when I can't abide my longing to be back in Africa
Top reviews from other countries
Daniela María Laphond Muñoz
Out of Africa es una joya cinematográfica!!!
Reviewed in Mexico on September 22, 2015