You have to know going in that this no-budget South African import is shot with no particular skill, cartoonishly conceived, simplistically acted, and written with balled fists pounding the keyboard into whimpering submission. But if it doesn’t warm your heart, you haven’t got one. Writer Suzanne Kay (Diahann Carroll’s daughter) and her husband, writer-director Mark Bamford, have crafted a three-ring circus of a Cape Town social-consciousness soap opera that makes Crash look vérité.
Our heroines are blond beauty Kate (Debbie Brown) and black beauty Lindiwe (Nthati Moshesh). Kate is an heiress whose life’s work at a cast-off animal shelter is trust-funded by the proceeds of her mother’s considerable experience marrying rich men. Kate’s embittered by her mother’s faithlessness, and so furious with her father for the divorce that she intends not to see him for the rest of her life. She foolishly expresses her anger through low-rent rendezvous with a conveniently unavailable married man who treats her like dispensable dirt.
Lindiwe married a dreamer who disappeared, leaving her in a hovel with a broken bed, a broken heart, an adorable son (perhaps 8 years old), and an angry momma who wants her to marry the well-off local preacher (an asshole, but in my opinion, movie people who habitually caricature ministers thus are expressing their own holier-than-thou assholery). Nothing daunted, Lindiwe industriously cleans house for an evil rich, racist white couple and goes to college by night. But she longs for love as much as Kate does.
Enter two hunky saints out of romance novels. Morne (Morne Visser) is a kindly veterinarian who treats the cute dogs at Kate’s shelter. Kate hires an entrepreneurial kid (coincidentally Lindiwe’s) who’s trained his dog to do cute tricks as an act for the shelter’s Adopt-a-Dog Day event. She foolishly visits the blacks’ shantytown at night looking for the kid and gets mugged (no blood, no rape—this movie steers way clear of half of the appalling crime rate on the Cape of No Hope). Her car breaks down. Coincidentally, Morne drives by to help her.
Meanwhile, Lindiwe gets swept off her pretty feet by Jean Claude (Eriq Ebouaney, of Lumumba), a nobly scholarly Congolese refugee astronomer, now reduced to volunteering as a janitor at the local observatory and hauling dogs at Kate’s shelter. He bonds like crazy with Lindiwe’s son. Lindiwe and Jean Claude’s courtship is a fusillade of shy smiles.
There’s also a third subplot about Kate’s Muslim assistant’s struggle to have a baby, but let’s skip over that to Good Hope‘s more pressing questions: Will Kate notice the vet who wants her to be his pet? Will she forgive her mum and dad? Will Lindiwe escape her wicked employers and preacher suitor? Can Jean Claude win Lindiwe’s hand? Are puppies cute?
It’s nice to sit and watch the inevitable happen, and any film that conveys the idea of racial harmony with a fond shot of copulating dogs can’t be all bad. (PG-13)
