Terri and Sandile form a strange couple: the young woman refuses to clearly declare her love and has an obvious fear of intimacy. As she earns her living as a phone sex operator, her calls interrupt her love life at every turn. The humour of this first film, improvised from a minimal structure with excellent actors, lies in the persistent mismatch – sometimes burlesque and sometimes poignant – between people. Surrounded by friends who want them to stay together, Terri and Sandile suspect that a conspiracy is afoot. Who stands to gain from the couple together: their friends, family, society, the Church? Another mismatch is that the characters pursue each other at the wrong time. Eugene, one of Terri’s clients, talks to her as if she were the ex-fiancée whose departure devastated him, which turns trivial phone sex into a hybrid affair, midway between denial and therapy. Finally, a mismatch because the parallelism of the different characters’ lives reflects a South African society in which, as the director says, “most people…are outsiders”. “Put people in a room and see what happens. That’s the story of South Africa”.
C. G.
