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Every surface period detail is present and correct to an eerie degree in “The Smell of Apples”: the gawkily short seasonal school uniforms, the ickily patterned kitchen tiles, the garden chairs like steel satellite
dishes, the orange-and-brown daisy print that anyone of a certain age will recognize from sundry towels, mattresses and beach umbrellas. Production designer Birrie Le Roux has crafted a pristine one-way time capsule to mid-1970s white South Africa; DP Lennert Hillege shoots it to softly lit, summer-burnt perfection. But there’s not a whisper of nostalgia to “The Smell of Apples,” director John Trengove’s slowly, then suddenly, piercing evocation of affluent Afrikaner family life in that era, and the litany of egregious abuses and inequalities propping it up. It’s told through the eyes of a naïve 11-year-old boy, but there’s no halo to his innocence — just a growing awareness of how much he doesn’t know, none of it good.
Drawn from a well-regarded 1993 novel by Mark Behr that has become a popular set text in South African schools and universities, “The Smell of Apples” joins other recent literary adaptations like Oliver Hermanus’ “Moffie” and Embeth Davidtz’s “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” in articulating the experiences of white people living inside an Apartheid bubble just on the verge of bursting. It’s a discomfiting and not especially fashionable point of focus; as in those films, we get only deliberately glancing, peripheral views of the black majority, their anguish never openly voiced. But these glaring blind spots, however hard to watch, are the point. “The Smell of Apples” intelligently demonstrates the effortful compartmentalization and denial that kept a system of white supremacy in place.
It’s a successful homecoming for Trengove, the Johannesburger who made a searing feature debut with the Sundance prizewinner “The Wound,” about ritual initiation and repressed sexuality in the traditional Xhosa community, before heading to the U.S. for his Jesse Eisenberg-starring follow-up “Manodrome,” a commendably ambitious but stifled manosphere study. “The Smell of Apples” resumes those films’ preoccupation with toxic masculine influence across generations, as well as their queer framing — though in a surprising departure from the novel, the latter is restricted to subtextual intimations.
Indeed, Trengove and co-writer Christopher Ciancimino’s impressively minimalist adaptation strips away much of Behr’s structural foreshadowing and underlining, including the novel’s flash-forwards to the child protagonist’s adult military service in the South African Border War. As it is, there’s an ample sense on screen of the plunging darkness toward which the country is headed, before any kind of dawn can establish itself, while it’s impossible not to feel the military’s past, present and future stranglehold on young Marnus Erasmus (Dawian van der Westhuizen, a real talent) at every turn. The only son of Johan (Hilton Pelser), the country’s youngest Army general, Marnus has a world of macho Afrikaner ideology to live up to, but already the boy, timid and fair and small for his age, suspects he might be a disappointment.
Johan generally treats Marnus with bluff good humor, though you can see the anxious scrutiny with which he sizes his son up — and when that worry gets the better of him, it emerges violently. Marnus’ best friend Frikkie (Wian Carstens) is a strapping, bullish lad, and when he’s over, which is often, Johan tends to treat him like another, stronger son — Marnus may feel a little frozen out by their bond, but he’s too shy and stoic to say so. “A father looks at his sons and sees his own shortcomings,” says enigmatic houseguest Mr. Smith (Alejandro Goic) to Marnus, and that’s no great comfort. Nor is Mr. Smith himself: a Chilean Army general, fresh from his role in the Pinochet coup, with whom Johan is covertly consulting about matters beyond Marnus’ understanding.
His homemaker mother Leonor (a superb Maude Sandham) and his 17-year-old sister Ilse (Karoline Watson) complete the immaculate family portrait, but there’s unrest there too. Ilse, a high-flyer at her conservative Afrikaans high school, is gradually catching wise to her father’s entitlement and cruelty, and to the injustices of the Apartheid government; Leonor puts on a brave face as she projects exactly the image her husband needs her to, but is unnerved by the barbed critiques of her liberal sister Karla (Inge Beckmann), who, by Johan’s decree, is not welcome in the family’s rambling, lushly landscaped Cape Town home.
The person who keeps that home shipshape, of course, is not Leonor but Doreen (Celeste Matthews Wannenburgh), the family’s black live-in maid — a longtime fixture whom Marnus takes too much for granted to fully realize his emotional attachment to her. (Her routine pet name for him is kleinbaas, which translates as “little boss,” and it’s said with weary affection but no irony.) The family, of course, would say Doreen is a valued part of the household, though her place in it is made quite clear when her orphaned teenage grandson Neville (Courtlin Baron) arrives to stay in her servants’ quarters, and is made most unwelcome by the master of the house. An exquisitely composed shot of Doreen, slumped in the kitchen half-light as she eavesdrops on the family’s dining-room discussion of Neville’s fate, encapsulates a world of upstairs-downstairs, black-white hierarchies.
Over a tight five-day timeline — as Marnus and Ilse finish school ahead of the December holidays, and the family prepares for their summer vacation — these various tensions impact one another in tacit but perhaps terminal ways. Some are mere faultlines, others crack into unavoidable conflicts, though they collectively unmask the ugly face of authority in South Africa in ways even the young, fanciful Marnus can’t blithely look past. The sins of the father are ultimately presented in a literal, stomach-churning slideshow that haphazardly alternates benign family snaps with gleeful photographic evidence of Johan’s war crimes.
It’s a queasy climactic setpiece — one that tests, in particular, the brittle wifely composure so precisely enacted by Sandham — though matters here don’t come quite as tidily to a head as they do in Behr’s novel, which culminated in a shocking act of transgression that you sense may be afoot in the film, though it’s never confirmed. “The Smell of Apples” isn’t less powerful for this elision: It works toward a state of forced family stability, everyone that bit more frightened and mistrusting of each other, but held stiffly in place by their own privilege and power. You can feel Trengove’s film, so beautifully crafted and impeccably paced, sometimes bristling against its own fine construction — anticipating the destruction of this walled-off, deeply ugly idyll.
