Mit Afrika
“Out of Africa” was one of the big winners
at the Academy Awards for this year, and it is not difficult to see why. This
is a gorgeous looking movie with A-list actors and a biopic that avoids many of
the classic story-arch tropes. I believe I only watched it once before, at an
age where I was totally unable to appreciate it.
Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep), of affluent
family and Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a Swedish Baron, both long to
get away to live a different life and so make an alliance of convenience and
move together to Kenya, a British colony in 1913, to setup a farm. Karen, now
Baroness Blixen, soon finds herself pretty much alone on the farm as Bror is
busy everywhere else than home. She has to learn to navigate this very
different environment the hard way, but she gets to love her life on the farm
and her interactions with the Kikuyu tribe as well as the Western community.
Through her friendship with Denys Finch
Hatton (Robert Redford) she gets to appreciate the wilderness, which makes for
an odd counterpoint to her very European home at the farm. Yet, her wilderness
skills come in handy when, instead of being evacuated during the war, she opt
to run supplies through the wilderness to troops fighting Germans in Tanzania
(then German East Africa). As her relationship with Bror becomes increasingly
estranged, her relationship with Denys develops into an awkward romance.
Awkward, because it challenges Denys free spirit nature. Yet, it is safe to say
that Karen Blixen was also quite a headstrong free spirit herself.
Rather than the custom happy ending, the
finale is something of a collapse. Certainly, Karen’s African adventure comes
to a sudden halt, but even that is done with a poetic touch and not without
beauty.
To my great shame I have never read
anything by Karen Blixen, and I have not even visited her home, Rungstedlund,
now a museum, even though it is only a short drive from where I live. Yet, I am
familiar enough with her appearance and reputation and, knowing that, trying to
apply those on Meryl Streep’s character is an interesting exercise. I think she
does it quite well. There is a long way from the old lady I am familiar with to
the young woman moving to Kenya, but I sense her spirit here. Only clear miss
is the awful attempt at replicating Karen Blixen’s characteristic haughty
Rungsted accent. It just sound weird and sometimes it is entirely forgotten.
I very much like that this is a biopic that
try to tell her story and tell us why it is that she is supposed to be special.
Of course there is a lot of human-interest elements, but these are integral
parts of her story and are not overshadowing her work and the personality that
would grow into the famous writer she became. I also like that, despite some
deviations from her actual history, the story development is tied to her real
life. It takes the story in directions an invented story with its requirements
to follow a Hollywood story-arch, would never go.
This is a slow picture. Despite it’s 160
minutes, the story is fairly easy to sum up, but I think this slow pacing was a
good choice for this movie. It has to dwell on the characters and the
situations for it to get under our skin. It allows us to get familiar with
Karen Blixen’s life in Africa, even in details that might otherwise be
neglected because it is in those details the story gets special.
“Out of Africa” is also a window into
colonial Africa. In hindsight we can mock or be upset about the colonial order
of things, such as the white Europeans looking completely out of place, yet
lording it among the natives, but I think the movie has enough sensitivity that
it can both show the absurdity in this status and find objectively good elements
happening. The Masai are described with awe and respect, the issues around schooling
for people who until recently had no use of it, and the potential conflict
between economic development and preservation of nature and culture. There are
a lot of layers in this movie, and it is its slowness that allow them to be
there.
I liked “Out of Africa” a lot better than I
expected I would, and I think I will point towards this one in the future when discussing
biopics. It is a movie for adults, but I think I have finally grown old enough
to watch and enjoy it.
