Out of Africa

Annotation for KRRR! 2016 by Radomír D. Kokeš

The exceptionalism of Out of Africa (1985) is easier to understand if we consider that, like other of the best films by director Sydney Pollack, it develops a tactic whereby, in addition to telling a Hollywood story, it also seems to tell about itself as an artistic experiment.

In Three Days of the Condor (1975), the hero, as a secret service employee, makes a living by searching for suspicious patterns in trashy spy novels, and so he becomes part of the very story that he analyzes and whose knowledge allows him to survive. Is it a trashy spy film, a thoughtful commentary on its methods - or both at the same time? In Tootsie (1982), we see the American actor Dustin Hoffman dressed as a woman, playing an American actor dressed as a woman. Is Tootsie a farce - or does he merely play with the possibilities of farce through farce?

In Out of Africa, Pollack probably took this self-conscious tactic the furthest: we see a romantic drama that deals with emotions so soberly that, through the motifs associated with storytelling, it tells about a romantic drama rather than being one itself.

In other words, the film is shot as a narrative that, first, has several beginnings and, second, is aware of itself as a narrative according to rules that can be broken. It is not a traditional epic story that would give a coherent idea of ​​the lives of a group of people over a longer period of time. It is more like a sequence of memories of a narrator in off-screen commentary who purposefully omits events, is not particularly concerned with maintaining a clear chronological sequence, and if certain events are not considered interesting enough from her point of view, she simply does not report them.

It might seem that Out of Africa has a more or less banal plot... The heroine marries in Africa as part of a "marriage of convenience", separates from her husband and falls in love with a charismatic hunter, who is too free-spirited for a more permanent relationship. But it is precisely the play with multiple levels of narration and with the genre patterns of romantic drama that allows the viewer to connect meaningfully, rather than with the characters, to the impressive environment of the fictional world, which combines the captivating exoticism of Africa with the raw capture of the loss of its innocence. Pollack was a director of strong actors, whom he led responsibly on the one hand and on the other hand he placed the greatest responsibility on their instinct in maintaining the balance between "playing kitsch - playing with kitsch". Three Days of the Condor could easily have ended up as a cheap cinder, Tootsie as a farce and Out of Africa as a sentimental harlequin. And if Out of Africa did not have - in the above sense - precisely balanced acting performances by Meryl Streep, Robert Redford or Klaus M. Brandauer, it would be in vain to fascinate with the stage-sophisticated panoramas of Africa or the lingering tones of John Barry's captivating music in the background.

PS: The annotation was created by fundamentally revising my own text written ten years ago for the Summer Film School (Uherské Hradiště).