Nowhere in Africa (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Skinner: We need a name that's witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it.

Apu: How about the "Be-Sharps"

(General laughter, then silence when they simultaneously realize it isn't funny.)

Skinner: Perfect

My first reaction to "Nowhere in Africa" was very similar to the Be Sharps first reaction to their new name on The Simpsons. I thought the film was terrific, very honest and moving, beautifully painted. It was only upon thinking about it that I found it quite flawed. When I thought about it some more, I realized that there was a good explanation for those flaws, and that they were not really flaws at all, but part of a narrative device.

It's a German movie (in German and Swahili) about a family of middle class German Jews who move to Africa in the late 30s to avoid the situation in Germany.

• The father is a lawyer by trade, but he realizes that a simple agricultural life in Africa is better than the alternative, so he resigns himself to make do as best he can.
• The mother seems to be a material-oriented woman, whose last decision before leaving for Africa is to buy a ball gown instead of the refrigerator her husband asked her to bring. She starts with a condescending attitude toward Africa and Africans, but is unable to equate her attitude toward Africans with the Germans' attitude toward Jews. She is miserable. She and her husband develop marital troubles, and her eye wanders.
• The daughter is a little girl who does what little kids invariably do, which is to make some kind of a life in their new surroundings. She learns Swahili, makes African friends, and generally gets on with the process of living.

When the war is over, the family members have to make a difficult decision about returning to Germany. Their Jewish friends are gone. Their life is in Africa. The daughter has never really known anything but Africa, and is happy with her life. The wife, despite a difficult adaptation, has gradually come to love her surroundings. The father, in love with Africa at first, would like to return because he has a profession in Germany, and no talent for farming or soldiering, his sole choices in Africa.

The director uses a warm golden palette to show the simple landscapes of Kenya. This is not a Discovery Channel special. There are not many arcane tribal customs or exotic animals on display, except in the same frequency they would occur in the lives of the Germans. The cinematography is gorgeous and simple. The situations and dialogue are free from rhetorical flourishes. The two actresses who played the little girl are completely captivating. I watched it once and was touched by it.

Then I started to think about it. How is it that all the kids in Africa were so accepting of their new playmate? Do you infer that children there are not like children in the rest of the world? They don't make fun of outsiders? How is it that all the Africans are so proud, so wise, so gentle? Are we to infer that nobody has any violent urge to overthrow the white colonials? How is it that the Africans seem to make no distinction between Germans and English and Jews? Are they so pure of heart as to be incapable of understanding the concept of warfare between tribes with different languages, and that different people worship different gods? All of the film's rosy-tinted suggestions are contradicted by actual historical events in Africa.

Then I started to think some more? Where are the real hardships of African life for the Europeans? The film concentrated on things that are easy to adapt to. It is not that difficult to learn new languages and to eat new food. But what about constantly fighting the attacks of worms? What about the lack of medical care when somebody really needs it? Those were the sorts of things that finally persuaded me to leave the African and other undeveloped countries where I once worked cheerfully. I almost died in a poor country once from a simple attack of diarrhea, and was saved only because I worked for a big oil company, whose local officials were able to bribe me into the top hospital where they took my vitals and rushed me to the top of the priority list. In the US or Europe, the whole matter would have been nothing, but what if I had been on my own in the developing world? Those kinds of issues, the matters of difficult adaptation for outsiders, were completely ignored in the film. The author chose instead to deal with the Europeans' shallow and ultimately foolish resistance to matters which were actually simple adaptations.

Then I realized that I was overreaching with analysis. In fact, what I observed was exactly what should have been in the movie. The story, after all, was told through the eyes of a child, narrated by the adult version of that child many years later, from her dim memories of that period. Since she was just a child at the time, her understanding of things was not profound. Their gentle cook did seem like a perfect person to her. Since her recollections occurred many years after the events portrayed, her memories were romanticized and selective. Presenting the story this way is a perfectly legitimate literary invention. Unfortunately, that type of literary device - using an adult's childhood memories to narrate a story - is generally clearer on the written page, where the POV is continually re-established.

I guess it's best to go back to my first reaction, my gut reaction to the movie. It's an old-fashioned story that draws one into the characters, then allows those characters to grow. It hooked me. It hooked a lot of other people as well.