Kanarie (Canary): an exuberant gay '80s romp with a sharp bite

19June 2019.
by Drew Rowsome -

It's easy to see why Kanarie aka Canary became a hit on the gay film festival circuit including Inside Out. The opening sequence alone is worthy of cult classic status, with the rest of the film establishing a unique and absorbing quality. Director and co-writer Christiaan Olwagen has assembled a canny mix of ingredients with Canary being simultaneously a coming out story, a nostalgic and colourful salute to '80s pop music, a "you're in the army now" male bonding epic, and a troubling analysis of South Africa at the height of apartheid. That those elements mostly gel and enhance each other creates a strong, and very entertaining, artistic vision.

We first meet Johan Niemand when his hags dare him to wear the wedding dress he has designed - and that he thinks makes him rival Princess Di - out on the street. As he promenades, the film intercuts with what he sees in his mind, which is a '80s video dance extravaganza set to Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy." It doesn't end well but it is such an exuberant introduction setting up the fantasies and dilemmas of a smalltown boy so concisely, that it directly bypasses the mind and lodges right in the heart.

Johan is conscripted into the mandatory two years of military service but his piano playing and vocal abilities get him assigned to The Kanaries, a troupe that travels South Africa promoting the military, religion and family values. He meets the flamboyant Ludolf (Germandt Geldenhuys) who is the overweight recruit made to suffer homophobic, and body shaming abuse, and Wolfgang (Hannes Otto) who is sensitive - he wears glasses to almost disguise his hunkiness - and becomes Johan's love, and sex, interest. The rest of the choral group and the army/religious authority figures are similarly stereotypical but fortunately used in intriguing ways.

We've all seen joining the army films and we've all seen tortured gays forced into the army films, so Olwagen is able to skip through much of the brutality in a crisp '80s style. He prefers to make his points through montages and a striking use of characters posing for still photography to make specific metaphorical transitions. He is also much helped by Schalk Bezuidenhout who is a real find as Johan. Apparently a well-known comedian in South Africa, Bezuidenhout is mainly morose throughout Canary, but he has the gift of expressing emotional depth with his eyes and when he blossoms into a dance number in his head, or falls in love, he radiates contagious joy.

The plot detours with enough originality and comic timing to become fresh and keep the viewer off-kilter. And most of the supporting cast are deliciously comic and realistic in an offbeat manner, again, very '80s and borderline Almodovar. There are two mis-steps with a mental breakdown dream sequence that goes too far, and, echoes of Moonlight, a handjob that is both unrealistic and carries way too much torturous gay emotional weight. Even for the '80s. However Bezuidenhout's commitment and physicality papers over those to get the plot, and the drama to come, set up properly.

Canary is suffused with an insistent but innocent homoeroticism. The soldiers are all attractive and are ogled from a safe distance both nude and in tighty whities. The vicious Coporal Crunchie - played by the magnificently malevolent (those eyes and eyebrows!) and insanely hot Beer Adriaanse - and the DILF Reverend Koch (Gérard Rudolf) both set off gaydar alarms, but not even the understanding Reverend Engelbrecht (Jacques Bessenger) actually comes out. Even Johan doesn't come out, though it is implied that he will. 

That homoeroticism, that innocence, harks back to Johan's main pop obsession, Boy George and Culture Club. The most telling moment is when Johan explains to Wolfgang just how much it would have meant if Boy George had actually come out (set in 1985, Canary can't reference O'Dowd's eventual stumbling and conflicted process of exiting the closet). And that is what Canary is really about, how we all fumble and try to steer a moral course while becoming the fabulous inner self we really are. While it isn't entirely a feel-good movie with a triumphant 11 o'clock number, Canary comes pretty close, and the nuance of that adoption of that particularly gay camouflage of innocence, almost perfected by Boy George until he too cracked under its weight, gives it a bittersweet aftertaste that is heartfelt and memorable.