It’s a matter of perspective. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a 2002 novel about white nomadic farmers in a shifting Rhodesia (soon to become Zimbabwe), reads one way on the page and another on screen. The framing now undercuts the message: This story about lives in cultural upheaval becomes one where white characters retain agency, while Black characters are reduced to props, or worse, portrayed as predatory for seeking revolution.
“Are we racists?”
Stuck inside this mistranslation of the novel’s purpose, though, is a great central youth performance by Lexi Venter as Bobo. Dirty, disillusioned, and disassociated, Bobo’s journey weighs heavily for an eight-year-old, as her family deeply distrusts Black Africans and their independence movements.
Shamefully, the movie somehow views the Black Africans through the same lens, as though meant to promote empathy with the familial perspective of resentful displacement, rather than with the motives of the Black African characters. When the film does switch to their perspective, they’re seen as leering back, framed almost grotesquely, like showing the truth of the perspective is enough, but instead, the film just occupies the colonialist lens which it is designed to critique.
Colonial collapse centering on the white perspective can work, but first-time filmmaker Embeth Davidzt and cinematographer Willie Nel focus so solely upon the white perspective that the background events, of revolutionary impeding Black independence, almost feels like an imposition upon the characters. This may be how they feel, but to validate it by the framing, suggests to us this is also how the movie feels, and it carries a note of wrongness in tone that the movie cannot shake.
The film drifts by like a dream state which accompanies Bobo’s inward drift, into a sensory and imaginative state. This pairing, of childlike absorption, show the character’s inner-conflict tidily. The film loosens its narrative threads by taking on this free-floating structure and its harder to piece together the narrative of why this is the story and what it’s telling us, but experientially, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is operating from the microscopic perspective of a child struggling to understand their place in a shifting world, when their family are also deeply disillusioned and wandering through change like it’s a death sentence.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, anchored by Lexi Venter’s good and well-directed performance, may be worth going to the movies for, if you can focus on this one winning aspect, and set aside the awkward framing. Fundamentally, it’s a sort of missed opportunity to find empathy in revolutionary action, which is not well-structured enough to overcome its framing. This film, which on its face is a story about the end of colonialism, is still stuck within the lens and worldview of colonialism, and that’s perhaps its greatest misstep, a misreading of what a film could do to empower the story at its center with more ethos.