Meanwhile, set on the slopes of South Africa’s rooibos-growing Cedarberg Mountains, it’s a coming-of-age story steeped in the character of the indigenous tea beloved and mispronounced around the world — its smooth, earthy taste in the late afternoon. It has a burnt floral scent and a warm tobacco colour. But if there’s much of the beauty of the mystical magic hour in Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s debut film, it’s not a hollow journey story: By carefully scrutinizing its tense young persona before gradually broadening its gaze, “Carissa” is rich with a sense of calloused hands. And the hearts of the neglected but hard-working rural people. It is not surprising that our heroine dreams of escape, although this is not a fairy tale about city versus country.
Instead, it is the precise, specific gradations of gentrification and rurality within its remote location that distinguish Jacobs and Delmar’s film from others of its ilk. Likewise, the detail and curiosity in the depiction of rural colored people (not a slur but a specific multiracial group in South Africa) has been little depicted even in local cinema. This combination of cultural specificity and the world’s most seductive filmmaking technique — shades of Andrea Arnold here and Michelangelo Framartino there, though not derivative of it — should carry “Carissa,” which premiered in the Orizzonti Competition in Venice. , to the festival circuit next year.
Carissa’s (Gretchen Ramsden) face, once youthful, lineless and prematurely tired, concludes the film in two close-ups, her gaze narrowing and disappearing into the distant distractions of her phone. Browsing videos is this young woman’s main connection to a wider world she fears to miss, as she was born and raised in the small mountain town of Wuppertal – about 200 miles north of Cape Town – by her grandmother Wilhelmina (Wilhelmina Hesselmann). , one of many non-professionals in the group). Rooibos plantations surround the village. Options outside this industry for locals are few.
So when plans are announced to build a luxury golf area next to the tea fields, many of Wuppertal’s younger residents sign up for employment and education programs offered by developers. Wilhelmina encourages Carissa to follow her example, though Carissa is less keen: her ambitions for her future may be vague, but they do not include serving the wealthy for an average salary. Jacobs and Delmar’s lean, character-driven script eschews assertive rhetorical commentary on questions of urbanization and land development, implicitly playing the benefits of new business schemes against the restless and resistant urges of the individual.
Carissa finds short-term relief from her monotonous reality at the local bar, where she routinely gets drunk and acts disorderly with her best friend Gladwin (Gladwin van Niekerk), much to Wilhelmina’s growing consternation. But when her misbehavior finally bars her from home, she finds physical and emotional refuge in an environment even sleepier than that of Wuppertal: the remote rooibos farm of her estranged grandfather Hendrik (Hendrik Krell), where she is put to work harvesting, drying and packing. Coarse crop with yellow flowers. (Rooibos enthusiasts may delight in the loving, methodical depiction of this concrete, earthy process.) The work is difficult, and the living conditions are volatile, but gradually, Carissa gains a sense of connection to the land she has lived on so far, and to another community. The agricultural community from which she had previously seen herself separated. With that comes the inner calm that has eluded her throughout her short life.
This is a modest novel of gentle personal discoveries, but it nonetheless feels shaky from within. Carissa may not travel terribly far during the film, but her awareness of her current world expands dramatically, making for a more nuanced thriller than might be expected in a coming-of-age story of this variety. Ramsden (previously seen in South Africa’s 2019 Oscar submission “Toorbos”) gives a bright but carefully contained performance, her expressions and bearing softened in fine degrees as her being opens up to the possibilities of her environment. Her interactions with her non-professional co-stars are natural and fluent, though any disparity in acting styles heightens Carissa’s dreamy appearance of not quite belonging.
Meanwhile, Gray Coetzee’s gorgeous cinematography gives this little story a rich sense of scale and texture, attuned not only to the vast, natural splendor of the local landscape but also to the less postcard-ready details of everyday light, dust, and domestic space. The film’s palette may yield the crunchy coppery brown of the rooibos plant itself, but the towering African sky is an ever-changing mood palette of the hottest pinks and deepest blues—promising other worlds for Carissa, perhaps for other days to come, somewhere beyond. Mountain.