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I’ll grant this to the South African film Of Good Report, which screens at CIFF tonight at 6:10 PM and on Saturday at 4:15 PM (and in a special off-site screening at the Logan Theatre on Sunday at 6:30 PM): it has a lot more fun with arbitrary mystery than any other film I’ve seen at the festival. Lead actor Mothusi Magano doesn’t speak once in the entire movie, even though his character’s an English teacher and presumably he talks sometimes (moreover, no one makes reference to him being mute). Writer-director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka shows us only those moments in which Magano communicates through body language—this is supposed to make him seem enigmatic, but the decision’s effective mainly because it allows the spectator to linger on the actor’s memorable physique. His puffy gums make him look as though he just got his wisdom teeth pulled—he seems vulnerable, like an overgrown child.
I’ll also grant this to Of Good Report: it’s not a mediocre film. It is a bad one. In Qubeka’s kamikaze mission to get a rise out of his audience, he works in unfunny drug jokes (with a stoner-handyman character who seems to have wandered in from an Adam Sandler comedy) and overwrought dream imagery that suggest misguided homages to David Lynch. This might work as a midnight show, but I’m not sure how forgiving the audiences will be in the early evening, when CIFF has scheduled the screenings.
