Chadlee Skrikker | Beyond Repair / 2018

fear and loathing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chadlee Skrikker (screenwriter and director) Beyond Repair / 2018 [12 minutes]

 

South African director Chadlee Skrikker’s first film, Beyond Repair (in Afrikaans), is a horrifying work of terrifying consequences which forces us to ask the question the title itself implies: who or what is “beyond repair.”

     Obviously for the parents of the young 17-year-old Simon (Laurent de Froberville), it is their son who has been found in bed with another boy who is beyond repair. Their only solution is to immediately ship him off to his brother in a rural location in South Africa for a “cure.” The brother, Falkner (Theo Schneider) may believe, as he tells Simon that he truly loves him, but his behavior represents an irrational homophobia that is far beyond love or hate.

      Even his first words upon greeting Simon are chilling: “I will be hosting a gathering tonight. You’re coming with me. And I’ll be taking your phone.” Immediately he is warning his brother of the impending event for which he will be removed from communication with all others.

  At the event, held under a viaduct, Simon is ordered to take off his shirt and tell the others what he has done.

     “My parents found me kissing another boy.”

     “And what does that make you?”

     Simon answers ironically, fully knowing what they expect of him: “Seventeen?”

    Falkner evidently is part of a cult-like group of men, who wear dark trousers and white shirts who get their major excitement out of beating up gay boys that are either just in the neighborhood or, more likely, sent to them for rectification. While telling him that what he about to do is for Simon’s own good, the actual ceremony, as it is presented in a dark isolated location with a bonfire blazing in the background, basically consists of the brother and each of his friends slugging and kicking the young sinner until he is nearly dead.

     Falkner pulls him by the hair back into life, forcing him for the week of his stay to help in the farming chores, all of which Simon, realizing that he has no alternative if he is to return home and to even a semblance of his former life, obediently enacts, finding some beauty and comfort in the landscape despite his brother’s insistence that he learn how to shoot a rifle aiming at the local animals. His brother demands Simon learn Judo, that he does push-ups and other exercises. Simon is forced to burn his old clothing and himself wear a white shirt. All apparently to fit the notion of what Falkner believes to represent heterosexual normative behavior. What seems like his final test is to help in the beating of another boy, apparently another “faggot” found or sent to them for reeducation, as if these men are on a constant search and destroy operation.

      We can only wonder what has made his brother into this kind of being. Clearly, it must be the homophobia of the culture itself, the agreement among his fellow farmers that being a faggot is the next to last position of the male patriarchal totem. But strangely, we see no women to which these men seem attached, and Falkner appears not to be married, happy enough with the whores he buys each week; it this case, part of his therapy is requiring his younger brother to engage in sex with just such a female sex worker (Juliette Pauling). But we have wonder what has brought him into this outsider world without any true expression of love? Might he be sublimating his own queer desires that he too felt at Simon’s age, so terrified of those feelings that he has ever since shunned the most obvious normative heterosexual patterns of wife and family, joining up with other emotionally scarred men to torture those who do not take the same course?

      Finally, the time comes when, it appears, Simon will be sent home (“Dad’s coming to get you tomorrow.”) As a celebration, Falkner demands Simon join his friends for one final fling. Simon, who declares that he only wants to return home, is clearly apprehensive about their final celebration for his “graduation” from the “torture school.”

    They begin at a bar for the promised “one night of fun before you go.” But soon, through the barroom window Simon spots something that absolutely horrifies him, and rushes from the spot, trying to tell his friend Jacob (Takalani Muthig), a young black man of his age, that he can’t be there. “But you told me to come. You texted me.”

      Obviously, Jacob is the boy Simon was kissing, and his brother Falkner texted Jacob to come. The cult boys brutally beat him, and in the next scene Falkner is seen carrying his body to an isolated meadow, where he drops him, handing his brother a rifle and commanding that he “Do it!”

      Now we realize the bottom rung of his just recently apartheid society’s totem pole, a being who in Falkner’s mind is not even human, “beyond repair” of even his brutal beatings. 

     Simon refuses, Falkner himself going after Jacob with the clear intention of beating him to death. He gets a lock-hold upon the boy’s head and demands again that Simon shoot him.

     He takes up the gun and finally fires, as we hear the howling sound of a man shot. It is Falkner who screams into the night like an animal in pain as the two boys scurry off, now murderers in a system that is itself beyond repair, the boys having killed a man that, as part of that system, at least in Simon’s thinking, is also now beyond all help.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).