Tebogo Malebogo | Legodimo le kopana le lefatshe (Heaven Reaches Down to Earth) / 2020

refusing to put out the fire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tebogo Malebogo (screenwriter, based on a story by Malebogo and Petrus van Staden, and director) Legodimo le kopana le lefatshe (Heaven Reaches Down to Earth) / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

Tebogo Malebogo’s Zulu-language film Heaven Reaches Down to Earth may be one of the first gay Zulu movies ever made, but don’t expect this work to graphically portray its subtle sexual concerns. As film commentator Inge Coolsaet makes clear, the title and the last words of this film, “And this is given once only,” are quotations from André Aciman's queer novel Call Me By Your Name. And the film clearly was influenced and references such natural world queer films such as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country. But “what happens in the mountains stays in the mountains,” as Coolsaet cleverly comments.

     Tau (Sizo Mahlangu), a laid back and clearly more mature boy, and Tumelo (Thapelo Maropefela), constantly alert and sexually afire, go camping in a grand national park. They appear to sleep in separate tents, but from their intense stare-downs of one another and their obvious appreciation of one another’s bodies in action, it is clear that at some point or another the friendship will explode into openly gay sex. And apparently it does, although we never witness it.

     The narrative (spoken by Balindile ka Ngcobo), however, gives us strong clues to the deep-banked desires these men have for one another in relationship to the heteronormative values that hold them back for their own feelings.

      Malebogo describes the feelings in poetic terms that suggest tribal relationships with nature itself. The fire becomes the symbol here for sexual desire, as Tumelo repeats that it is his job to put out the fire, “but the men refused.” Time and again the fire remains lit, both literally and emotionally in this film when both have expected it to be extinguished. Even swimming in a cool lake cannot quite cool down their desires and they look longing at one another, the viewer half-expecting as in European and US films, the other to dive down deep into the water and suddenly pop up in front or behind the other for sexual interlude. But these boys dive only to come for air at a distance from their deep gaze of affection. We see them constantly staring out of their tent flaps, obviously longing for the other. And at one point Tumelo is on the phone attempting to reassure whoever he is speaking with—presumably a girlfriend or a worried mother—that all is fine and he will soon be home, all the while perspiring profusely, the fire clearly now gone out deep within his body. As he will admit near the end of the film, everything may be well, but it is now utterly different.

      As opposed to the fire are the mountains which, like the heteronormative world in which they exist, are constantly watching over them, growing sunny when below it is dark, leading them forward when they might wish to spend a bit longer at their nightly campfires.

      Near the end of this short film, they both attempt to finally climb the mountains to their top. If nothing else, the narration certainly treats the struggle like a sexual orgasm we watch them struggle up the steep cliffs in darkened images in which we think we can possibly discern the two touching or embracing, to discover the place where “heaven reaches down to earth”—an almost orgiastic moment. Most important, when Tumelo finally reaches the top, he (through the narrator) finally shouts out the revelation that “We find nothing.”

     The restrictions that they have feared clearly are not in the mountains, the heteronormative values they have feared are suddenly totally meaningless.

       Back in their the shelter of their tented caves, we see Tau staring out of his opening as if awaiting his friend’s entry or his own volition to move toward Tumelo’s tent.

    Although both actors are beautiful, the film ultimately is not about the body, but the spirit in relationship to the world which they inhabit. And by film’s end that spirit has been truly liberated.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).