Director/Writer: Ralph Ziman
Camera: Nic Hofemeyer
Music: Alan Lazar
Cast: Rapulama Seiphemo, Ronnie Nyakale, Jeffery Zekele, Robert Hobbs, Shelley Meskin, Kenneth Nkosi, Jafta Mamabola, Motlatsi Mohloko.
(120 min. 16SLNV)

The Bottom Line.

The current landscape of South African movies consists mainly of brainless teen comedies and politically correct films that beat the “struggle” drums or strive to warm our hearts and jerk our tears with a manipulative melodrama about worthy social issues. In that  context  “Jerusalema” is as audacious and skilled as massive hijack of official cars outside the Parliament buildings in Cape Town, and it sets a new benchmark for our moribund film industry.

Writer/director Ralph Ziman

Main Review.

Ralph Ziman’s excellent crime thriller “Jerusalema” aims to play at the very top of its game , measuring itself against major international thrillers like “American Gangster”, “Scarface” or “The Departed”. In my view, it succeeds brilliantly and delivers a jolting, high-energy thriller that lifts the lid on poverty, crime and street-life in contemporary Johannesburg as no previous movie has done.  It follows the lives of Lucky Kunene (Rapulana Seiphemo) who gets accepted into a top business-school but is given no bursary. He and his best friend Zakes (Ronnie Nyakale) try to make money honestly, but Nazareth (Jeffrey Zekele) a Russian-trained, ex-MK soldier, offers them a different choice. Nazareth is angry about the way the new ANC elite have turned their backs on their grass-roots soldiers. Why should the politicians grow rich and powerful and not he? He has defiantly built a crime-business that deals in hi-jacking and smash-and-grab raids into which he recruits Lucky and Zakes as spotters and minor league car-thieves. The boys soon have money enough to support their families. Then they are involved in a bloody smash-and-grab heist that goes horribly wrong and almost die in the ensuing shoot-out. They decide to get out of the crime scene and scrape together enough money to buy a taxi. The work is hard and it affords a paltry income, but at least they are making a legitimate living, until they fall foul of a rival taxi-route owner, who attacks them and destroys their vehicle and their livelihood.

The young Lucky and Zakes

Broke and wretched, they find it hard escape the influence of Nazareth and the other crime bosses. When Lucky hits rock-bottom he decides that if he can’t beat them, he might as well join them. That’s when all the skills and intuitive intelligence that could have made Lucky a successful legitimate businessman, are employed to the make him a successful gangster, a slum lord and con-man, who gets so rich that he can match the smart cars and designer suits of any of the nouveau riche black elite of the city. The rest of the film is account of Lucky’s rise to power and wealth. He steers clear of violent crime and the lucrative prostitution- and drug-cartels. He’s into white collar-crime, posing as an outwardly respectable businessman with a politically correct social agenda.  He finds himself a grand new house in Johannesburg’s most affluent suburb and starts a romance with a rich young white woman, after he has rescued her junkie brother from the clutches of ruthless Nigerian drug lord. Lucky may have had to scramble up the grubby back-stairways to get there, but once he has a glossy car, designer suits and piles of money, no-one questions him. He’s achieved the eminence he dreamed of as a hungry boy in a Soweto shack. But then a tough, tenacious white cop, ironically named “Blakkie” Swart  (Robert Hobbs) starts dogging his every move, and to make matters worse, Lucky finds a traitor in his ranks. 

Robert Hobbs as "Blakkie" Swart

 The skill of Ziman’s engrossing film is that it races along at breathless pace and casts it narrative net wide. It’s a big, ambitious, intelligent film featuring superb urban landscapes of Hillbrow and Johannesburg, shot by Nic Hofmeyer, who offers us a vision of Jo’burg, so vivid, that I can think of no local film that can match its visual strength.  Alan Lazar’s music is equally inventive and original. He uses familiar township rhythms and also the music brought in by the huge immigrant community, but he mixes and blends them with such skill that that they become an urban tone poem. Ziman is scrupulous about not deploying the old familiar South African stereotypes. The white cop who is dogging Lucky may be a leftover from the old apartheid police force, and he’s unquestionably mean and aggressive, but as events play out, he is shown to be a man of principle who really cares about truth. Another smart move is to portray Lucky’s accomplice in the city council as a white Afrikaans woman who is just as eager to grab a slice of the “rainbow nation” pie as Lucky is. Ziman avoids cheap racial or dramatic stereotypes. Even Lucky is not portrayed solely as an unprincipled gangster. The writing, the shrewdly ambivalent ending  and the precise, intense acting of Rapulana Seiphemo always show us two sides of the story.

Rapulan Seiphemo as Lucky

Even the worst villain of the piece, a Nigerian drug lord Ngu, is portrayed with a degree of mitigating insight. In a powerfully delivered speech he tells Lucky that he’s a member of the Ibo tribe, whom he describes as “the Jews of Africa”. He suffered discrimination and oppression in Nigeria and came to South Africa, only to find that he must fight against the xenophobic prejudice towards the despised “makwerekwere”. That speech is underscored by two other characters, a Portugese slumlord whose building Lucky steals, and an Orthodox Jewish man, reminding us that this country is full of people who left their home and came to South Africa to find the status and wealth that Lucky, who was born here, finds so difficult to achieve. There’s no gratuitous racial finger-pointing at any group. There’s just a clear and credible insight into this country’s still-unsettled mix of racial groups, nationalities and tribes who are all looking for the good life.  Ziman weaves together a portrait of a city steeped in mistrust and crime, of which Hillbrow is the epicenter. From taxi violence and drugs, through prostitution and theft, to big-time fraud and murder, Ziman exposes the reality of the city’s “mean streets” in a perspective that no South African film has offered so clealry.

Jeferey Zekele as Nazareth

Another impressive feature in the unexpected religious theme that runs through the film. South Africa is still, numerically speaking, a church-going nations and the film’s title “Jersualema” points directly to that fact. One of the best performances is the film is relatively minor one. Lucky’s mother is devoutly religious and her largely silent observation of her son’s life is wonderfully handled. She can hardly refuse to take the food and the money that Lucky gives her. It will feed and educate her other children and perhaps prevent them from following Lucky’s dangerous path.  Her final confrontation with him, bible in hand, in a jail cell, is complex and moving as she faces up to the fact that she too has been part of the process that has put her son in that cell. That religious theme is noted in the film’s title “Jersualema”, a hymn filled with hope and longing for the day the people find salvation in that promised, shining golden city on the hill. When seen from a distance Hillbrow, with it’s dramatic skyline is, for so many people struggling in the township shacks, like a place of hope and promise, a latter-day Jerusalem. In truth,however,  it is an illusion, a taunting echo-chamber of opportunities squandered and possibilities missed. Without being in any way a smug Afro-pessimist, Ziman makes us consider what an unholy mess has been made of  the hopes that were fostered and the promises that seemed so rich and attainable just 30years ago