After an acting career spanning roughly three-and-a-half decades, Embeth Davidtz mostly has a succession of love interests, sidekicks and maternal supporting roles to show for her hard work.
Which makes her cinematic adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” so striking, because I never would have guessed that Davidtz was capable of making a film like this.
Davidtz not only wrote and directed this film, but also stars as the mother of Fuller’s younger self, since the story centers on Fuller’s White Zimbabwean family. It is set in 1980, during the aftermath of the Rhodesian Bush War.
Davidtz’s South African background serves her well in telling Fuller’s story for the screen. She was joined in making this movie happen by fellow South African Trevor Noah, former host of “The Daily Show,” who served as executive producer.
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” joins the ranks of Oscar-bait films that could be summed up as “small children remain innocently self-absorbed in the midst of catastrophically awful real-life historic events,” but it offers the relatively novel value of dissecting more recent colonialism (as in, stuff that happened within my lifetime).
Examining the historic occupation of African countries through the eyes of the Whites who settled there can run the risk of whitewashing the plight of the native Africans, but “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” focuses instead on how colonialism twisted and deformed even the Whites who ostensibly benefited from it.
Although Fuller’s grandmother prides herself on the family’s “breeding,” 7-year-old Alexandra “Bobo” Fuller herself (played by Lexi Venter) points out that the family has no money, and the living conditions on their farm are only made slightly less squalid by the African servants they employ to maintain the household, and to help look after Bobo.
Bobo is quite enamored of Sarah (Zikhona Bali), the African nanny who tells her folk tales and humors the girl’s flights of fancy, but Bobo’s affection for Sarah is entitled and reductive, closer to the fondness one might harbor for a loyal family pet.
We see Bobo thoughtlessly emulating the White adults around her, in their casually insensitive treatment of the native Africans, to the point that Sarah’s kin struggle to make Bobo realize that her nanny has a life outside of entertaining the idle White girl’s whims.
When Bobo asks her mother and grandmother if they’re racist, her mother reacts with horror and strenuously insists that they’re not, which she rationalizes because Fuller’s family and the other White Zimbabweans are shown as having mentally divided up the native Africans into the binary categories of “servants” and “terrorists.”
Bobo herself is preoccupied with the supposed threat posed by “terrorists,” since the White adults fear that any African could secretly be a terrorist.
On a deeper level, the White Zimbabweans’ dehumanization of the native Africans is made easier by the degree of inhumane disregard they show even to their fellow Whites, as Bobo’s grandmother ignores the pained cries of the girl’s grandfather, who’s confined to a wheelchair and soils himself while his wife refuses to look at him.
Bobo’s adolescent older sister is likewise shown being groomed by a predatory acquaintance of the family, which everyone but Bobo refuses to acknowledge.
Given how inherently unsympathetic the White settlers are made out to be, it’s impressive that Davidtz evokes empathy for Bobo’s mother, even as the narrative underscores that she’s wrong to want to keep the farm, because it’s revealed how much the mother sacrificed to settle there.
It’s easily the best performance of Davidtz’s career, authentic and nuanced, and it hammers home how a social order of exploitation harmed even the Whites who clung to it.
I was 5 years old during the events that Fuller would later write about, and seeing that version of 1980, so similar yet so removed from the present day, gave this tale an unsettling frisson for me.
It’s always tempting to dismiss the racism of history as limited to the more distant past, but it’s always nearer to today than we’d like to admit.