Chris Knipp
07-10-2025, 05:05 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20dtlz.jpg
LEXI VENTER IN DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT
EMBETH DAVIDTZ: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (2024)
Here is a film whose main characters are white racists, colonialists in South Africa. The sting may be lessened by having the main character an eight-year-old girl who knows no better and accepts the condescension of her elders. She's told black people have no last names, and she accepts that. We may watch with a sort of horrified curiosity to see the situation of 1980 Rhodesia recreated so convincingly. But the film is a rather a disappointment after that because it doesn't have very much to say. Nor does the life of white racists, this hardscrabble, disintegrating farm, seem an attractive environment. Not that this isin't a lively, colorful, atmospheric film.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was written and directed by Embeth Davidtz in her feature directorial debut. It's based on Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War when she was that little girl. The film can be compared to Claire Denis' 2009 White Material starring Isabelle Huppert as a heedless white woman in an unnamed African country who adamantly refuses to leave when the whites are being driven out. The mother here is, similarly, quoted by her daughter as saying she won't leave but she lacks the ruthless authority of Huppert's character and seems only a stubborn hedonist. This film is from the point of view of Bobo (Lexi Venter), eight-year-old tomboyish girl whose face is dirty and hair uncombed and who roams free, questioning her black carers - and adoring her nurse, Sara (Zakhona Bali), riding a motorbike and often smoking cigarettes. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, is portrayed by Embeth Davidtz, the director. The capture of the African atmosphere is good, but the action is meandering and inconclusive. Perhaps this is one of those frequent cases where a book can do what the film adaptation cannot, because ther rich descrioption, a feast of words, is missing here. The filmmakers have selected a sngle short dramatic period from a book that roams over a number of years and life in different African countries.
A review of the original memoir from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/19/alexandra-fuller-dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-2002-memoir) eleven years ago by Anne Enright shows how rich and dense with details Fuller's memoir is. Here were shown things that Bobo only partly understands, yet this is a crucial political situation, the very moment (we hear the announcement on the radio) when the Marxist indigenous leader Robert Mugabe wins the democratic electoin and the white colonial government is over. Wikipedia articles on Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia) and Southern Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Rhodesia) help explain what was going on during the time frame of the film.
Davidtz is good at reproducing the South African atmosphere on the famaily farm, with the cattle, the black servants, the many dogs and cats, the horse ridden with style by Bobo's mother, who as played by Davidtz looks stylish, if sweaty and a bit haggard, but is drunk a lot of the time. Bobo is cared for by Sara, whose husband Jacob (Fumani N Shilubana), a leftist, is very disapproving of the little white girl's free ways and makes clear by his subtitled words in his own language that he doesn't expect the whites to be on for long.
Caryln James in h34 Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-review-alexandra-fuller-embeth-davidtz-1235985478/) review, thinks it was a shrewd choice to rest so much on the little girl's shoulders, because the child actress is so good. Yes she is good, but she is taking us on a tour of the surroundings, the blacks, the whites, the civil war, the constant danger combined with a strangely sleepy feeling heightened by the mother's frequent drunkenness. It's hard to comment without reading the memoir, but it's been suggested that there is material in the admired book for more adaptations.
The cinemtography of Willie Nel captures both the hot sun and amiable disorder of the scene and the limitations of Bobo's vision, because often only closeup glimpses of people and scenes appear to us. The climactic moments mix the maudlin and risqué, with Bobo and her plump older sister singing Chris de Burgh's "Patricia the Stripper" as they speed away from the farm that has been sold by the father (Rob van Vuuren), and their mother cannot face it at first, pathetic compared to the strong if wrong-headed Clair Denis character in White Material. With the attempt to reenstate the black characters at the end that Robrert DAniels in Screen Daily (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-toronto-review/5196993.article?adredir=1)has called "hamfisted," we cannot but realize that we have seen a racist world filtered down through the naiveté of a child, as when we see Bobo try to start grooming black children to be her future servants. Perhaps this has been a "bold swing with difficult materials" as Daniels suggests, but it ends by leaving us just as uncomfortable as it did at the outset.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, 97 mins., premiered at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, also shown Toronto Sept. 6. It is released by Sony Pictures Jul. 11, 2025.
LEXI VENTER IN DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT
EMBETH DAVIDTZ: DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (2024)
Here is a film whose main characters are white racists, colonialists in South Africa. The sting may be lessened by having the main character an eight-year-old girl who knows no better and accepts the condescension of her elders. She's told black people have no last names, and she accepts that. We may watch with a sort of horrified curiosity to see the situation of 1980 Rhodesia recreated so convincingly. But the film is a rather a disappointment after that because it doesn't have very much to say. Nor does the life of white racists, this hardscrabble, disintegrating farm, seem an attractive environment. Not that this isin't a lively, colorful, atmospheric film.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was written and directed by Embeth Davidtz in her feature directorial debut. It's based on Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir about the experiences of her White Zimbabwean family following the Rhodesian Bush War when she was that little girl. The film can be compared to Claire Denis' 2009 White Material starring Isabelle Huppert as a heedless white woman in an unnamed African country who adamantly refuses to leave when the whites are being driven out. The mother here is, similarly, quoted by her daughter as saying she won't leave but she lacks the ruthless authority of Huppert's character and seems only a stubborn hedonist. This film is from the point of view of Bobo (Lexi Venter), eight-year-old tomboyish girl whose face is dirty and hair uncombed and who roams free, questioning her black carers - and adoring her nurse, Sara (Zakhona Bali), riding a motorbike and often smoking cigarettes. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, is portrayed by Embeth Davidtz, the director. The capture of the African atmosphere is good, but the action is meandering and inconclusive. Perhaps this is one of those frequent cases where a book can do what the film adaptation cannot, because ther rich descrioption, a feast of words, is missing here. The filmmakers have selected a sngle short dramatic period from a book that roams over a number of years and life in different African countries.
A review of the original memoir from the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/19/alexandra-fuller-dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-2002-memoir) eleven years ago by Anne Enright shows how rich and dense with details Fuller's memoir is. Here were shown things that Bobo only partly understands, yet this is a crucial political situation, the very moment (we hear the announcement on the radio) when the Marxist indigenous leader Robert Mugabe wins the democratic electoin and the white colonial government is over. Wikipedia articles on Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia) and Southern Rhodesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Rhodesia) help explain what was going on during the time frame of the film.
Davidtz is good at reproducing the South African atmosphere on the famaily farm, with the cattle, the black servants, the many dogs and cats, the horse ridden with style by Bobo's mother, who as played by Davidtz looks stylish, if sweaty and a bit haggard, but is drunk a lot of the time. Bobo is cared for by Sara, whose husband Jacob (Fumani N Shilubana), a leftist, is very disapproving of the little white girl's free ways and makes clear by his subtitled words in his own language that he doesn't expect the whites to be on for long.
Caryln James in h34 Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-review-alexandra-fuller-embeth-davidtz-1235985478/) review, thinks it was a shrewd choice to rest so much on the little girl's shoulders, because the child actress is so good. Yes she is good, but she is taking us on a tour of the surroundings, the blacks, the whites, the civil war, the constant danger combined with a strangely sleepy feeling heightened by the mother's frequent drunkenness. It's hard to comment without reading the memoir, but it's been suggested that there is material in the admired book for more adaptations.
The cinemtography of Willie Nel captures both the hot sun and amiable disorder of the scene and the limitations of Bobo's vision, because often only closeup glimpses of people and scenes appear to us. The climactic moments mix the maudlin and risqué, with Bobo and her plump older sister singing Chris de Burgh's "Patricia the Stripper" as they speed away from the farm that has been sold by the father (Rob van Vuuren), and their mother cannot face it at first, pathetic compared to the strong if wrong-headed Clair Denis character in White Material. With the attempt to reenstate the black characters at the end that Robrert DAniels in Screen Daily (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/dont-lets-go-to-the-dogs-tonight-toronto-review/5196993.article?adredir=1)has called "hamfisted," we cannot but realize that we have seen a racist world filtered down through the naiveté of a child, as when we see Bobo try to start grooming black children to be her future servants. Perhaps this has been a "bold swing with difficult materials" as Daniels suggests, but it ends by leaving us just as uncomfortable as it did at the outset.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, 97 mins., premiered at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, also shown Toronto Sept. 6. It is released by Sony Pictures Jul. 11, 2025.