Skooheid. Watch it, don’t watch it.

After a relatively luke warm reception at Cannes Film Festival this year, I took out some time last night to go see Skoonheid.

The only Afrikaans movie ever to open at the festival.

Let’s face it, it’s more “true cinema” than what Leon Schuster could ever do, and it doesn’t come straight out of Benoni, but it’s also not the best. The script is flawed, and it’s hard and raw. But worth a watch, if you could stomach it.

In short, it’s a story about a middle-aged, middle-income family man, Francois, who lives in the Freestate, drives a bakkie and speaks Afrikaans. Francois becomes dangerously obsessed with the son of an old friend who works as a Model in Cape Town.

After a series of rather random stalking events, Francois boozes it up in a gay bar, calls the hottie and asks him to take him back to his hotel – because he’s too drunk to drive. (As if South African men would EVER do that! They shamelessly drink and drive! – but then again, he’s dangerously obsessed.)

A whole lot of hungry (read horny) stares, glares, drool moments and ineffective locked-off shots of pointless scenes – it’s a try-to-hard-to-be-arty short film, stretched into a feature with all this wide-screen cinematography.

All of this takes us into about 90 minutes of the film, where the most dénouement scene occurs.

The drunken, middle-aged farmer, manages to overpower the young athletic student in –what I personally found- was one of the most repugnant male-rape scenes I’ve ever experienced in cinema.

Most of the audience found this scene particularly difficult to watch and i clasped a friend’s hand in what seemed to be a never-ending moment of the protagonist letting loose of his every single carnal desire and in a vile animalistic way, devouring every piece of fresh flesh of his feeble pray.

The Hollywood reporter said: “the lack of subtlety in this extremely blunt scenario prevents it from digging deeper to find any underlying emotion.”

Through most of the film, you feel sort of sorry for Francois who has to restrict his desires because of where he comes from but the pace of the film is too slow and the script too unconcluded to actually care about Francois from this point onward.

With too many gaps in the very shallow and superficial dialogue, the movie struggles to bring across any other emotion and you’re left wondering. About everything.

They could have at least given the movie an ending.

Show us how Francois blew his own brains out. Show us how the model hottie took revenge. Show us how Francois’s wife left him for the man she’s having an affair with.

Don’t just drive down a spiral shopping-mall exit making us carsick. Because it did make me vomit in my mouth… a little…