The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

(Second Viewing, Facebook Streaming, December 2019) I have very dim memories of watching The Gods Must Be Crazy as a kid, but good enough to remember the opening premise (a bottle thrown from a plane falls in a primitive desert tribe, but causes so much strife that one person is asked to get rid of it) and its final image (throwing the bottle down an Oceanside cliff) but very little of everything in between. As it happens, there’s an entire other film in between those moments, and much of the fun in re-watching the film was in uncovering something entirely new. Featuring an awkward biologist, a kidnapped schoolteacher and fleeing revolutionaries, the middle of the film is a bush farce that makes comedy out of unlikely elements and some more comedy out of classically inspired gags and situations that seem to come from a screwball film. It’s not quite as funny as I (hazily) remembered it, but there are a few good moments in it, and the sense of newness from the South African landscape is still novel enough to be interesting. Upon release in the early 1980s, the film attracted some deserved critical commentary for its depiction of its Bushmen characters and how it emerged from Apartheid-dominated South Africa. While the political situation in South Africa has improved and isn’t the hot-button issue that it was, there is still an uncomfortable dimension in the film’s representation of Bushmen as comic characters—it can be difficult to figure out if it’s meant to be caricatural or condescending or if there was any way for the film to proceed with its premise without offending someone along the way. Still, The Gods Must be Crazy is still different enough forty years later to be an interesting viewing experience.