Derente Films/ Netflix presents Kagiso Lediga (Max), Pearl Thusi (Samkelo), Akin Omotoso (Joel), Andrew Buckland (Heina), Prcious Makagaresta (Lazola), Kandile Tisane (Kabelo), Kate Liquorish (Tabitha), and Tyson Cross (Miles). Screenwriter/Director Kagiso Lediga: Producers, John Vodnik Tomsin Anderson, Kagiso Lediga; Executive Producers, Isaac Moga Jane, Ronnie Apteker, Luke Henkeman; Director of Photography, Motheo Moeng. © 2017.
Tennessee Williams, while writing A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), reveals in his diary “that a man in a crisis, so profoundly addicted to alcohol that he carried a flask of whiskey wherever he went… who wants to forget he isn’t still young and believing.” William Faulkner loved the written word and bourbon. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” He believed that alcohol helped him feel more and create better writing. Why am I lining up these sages of not-too-long yesteryears with compulsive drinking habits? I am struck by the uncanny observation that Catching Feelings brings to light, highlighting notable writers and their perspectives on the lives they lived with alcohol. There isn’t a scene in Catching Feelings when a player has not a pint of beer, a wine glass to his lips, a bottom-up shot of whisky to their lips like a choreographed routine, or a tumbler crackling with ice on bourbon in one hand and toga in the other––they are all writers or at least talk about books. Welcome to the patrician colony of present-day lettered South Africans.
But Omo! The consumption of alcohol among these literates is so religious that I, as a budding writer, stand afraid of my fate turning out to be so. Would I be an alcoholic like most writers and embark on a path of early destruction, damaging myself and my talent in a tumbler? Catching Feelings centers on Max (Kagiso Lediga) and Sam (Akin Omotoso), young couples embarking on life with all the trappings of marriage ahead of them. Soon, we will discover that Max, a writer with one successful book to his credit and a postgraduate degree, is affiliated with a community of his kind – writers. In every scene they meet, it is always booze and books. Notable among these friends is Joel, whose company he finds affectionate and pleasurable. But Joel isn’t married, and he flirts with a married White woman, who both meet in obscure places like college boarding home breakaways, playing truant, constantly suffocating each other with kisses and groping.
At the end of one of his classes, a student approaches Max and presents him with her unfinished manuscript. During a notable writer’s visit to the university, he and his friend, Joel (Akin Omotoso), had a standing-room meeting with Heina Miller (Andrew Buckland), the celebrated writer “This is Max, Matshane.” A possible professor introduces him. “He does Creative Writing with postgrads.” “I’ve heard that name, Blossom of the Rose?” Max, with an agitated smile, said, “Yes.” That afternoon, Heina picked Max up in his old drop-top for a joyride around town, straight to his old stomping ground (Heina is a Joburg native), and they had a blast together. Max throws up on a tennis court afterward, and Sam looks disgusted. He has been drinking the whole time and gets home drunk like a skunk. Heina gets a hold of Max by promising he’ll introduce him to publishers in England. Coupled with knowing that Heina had read his book, this was an added blessing for Max to be sold over to Heina’s friendship.
Meanwhile, Max and Heina become pals so quickly that he misses having time with his wife, Sam. At such a time, Sam would be pissed but she had enormous love for Max and was proud of the Writer’s husband. When he and Sam had made an appointment to be at a friend’s children’s book promotion party, a date Sam was banking on, since they had never been out together lately, he sat his wife up and hung out with Heina instead, at his house, where coke was passed around like toffee. With more drinking and drug use (the night Max is introduced to snorting coke), Max committed the most irredeemable sin of having affairs with his student while under the influence. Heina almost had a cardiac arrest, and Max had to rush him to the hospital. After his discharge, Max brings him to his home to recuperate. But it coincided with a reading session Max had accepted in Durban and had to fly out the next day, leaving Sam and Heina alone. In a bar, when asked by Sam’s friend in the presence of Joel if he had ever slept with a married woman, he replied, “Yes, twice.” A chance encounter with a friend he once stood beside at his wedding provoked feelings in him, a moment he never saw coming. “You left a guy with your wife at home? Together, just chilling? That’s like leaving a colonialist with all your treasures. Oh, you Africans don’t learn. You Africans with African ways. Look, I don’t want to disrespect you, but that guy is going to colonize that ass.” While in Durban, Max dreams of Heina and Sam having sex, and he wakes up agitated, running all over the hotel bedroom. Despite high expectations from the writers’ community in Durban, Max cancels his presentation, packs his luggage, and flies back to Joburg on the next plane.
L-R Kagiso Lediga, Heina Buckland
Max returns to Joburg late at night, like a thief in the night scurrying all over the premises and the alarm going off. This sudden turn in his attitude toward Heina is because he’s catching feelings. For the short time they have spent together, even as old as Heina is, he has demonstrated an immense love of women and sex with the vigor of a boy just through puberty and can have sex with whomever and whatever two-legged creature breathes. Like the night he passed out, he had taken a dose of Viagra at his age and had two naked women in the room with him.
During his stay at Sam and Max’s house, Max didn’t like how both were getting along, rubbing on each other, and ending up drunk until the wee hours of the morning. Max has seen his friend Joel having affairs with a married woman. If Joel and a married woman could commit such infidelities, Max’s mind starts messing with him. There is a possibility that Sam could do the same. Drug and alcohol had him recently lay his student, at Heina’s house when he experiments with coke (Charlie), and later had sex. Drug, Sex and Lies (2003). The guilty feeling that Max has had sex with his student under the influence; Joel could date a married woman with ease, and that Heina is still virile at his age, put the goddam fear in him that Heina must have slept with Sam while he was away. He confronts Heina about it on the university campus and, out of a jealous rage, hits Heina in the nose. He lost his job at the university, and Sam left him.
In a scene where Sam shows disgust for Max’s life and his drinking habits, she comments that Max stinks of alcohol and hasn’t come up with a manuscript. Max himself admits he will have to detox. Already, Max starts lying to Sam about everything: spending two thousand bucks on laundry on his way to Joburg that night, telling Sam he will be coming tomorrow, “Can I come to pick you up at the airport?” “No, I will catch the train,” Max lied while en route to Joburg. The dream he had in the hotel, Heina and Sam having sex, triggers every dark feeling in him. Catching Feelings couldn’t only be conjugal feelings one may have for the opposite sex. It can be instinctive, especially when circumstances point to the subject on your mind.
Sam, “What were you going to do if you found us?”
Max: “I don’t know. Pop a Gluck in your ass.”
Sam: “Clearly, we have trust issues here.”
Max: “I don’t know. What am I supposed to think? I spent time with this guy; he’s fucking everything that moves. I bring him into my house. Next thing, you’re enjoying every hour with him. You know he almost died from fucking people.”
At a certain point in this review, I can parallel the life of Heina to Tennessee Williams, when he wrote in his 1957 diary: “Two scotches at the bar, three drinks in the morning, daiquiris at Dirty Dick’s, three glasses of red wine at lunch and three at dinner.” This is practically the daily life of Heina and Max towing behind. The collateral damage of this newly acquired habit of drinking from sunup to the wee hours of the morning inwardly made Max hate himself and become careless about writing, about the wife he says he was afraid of losing. He becomes aggressive and obnoxious and loses his teaching job. The last word Sam says to him as he helps her load her things in the car is a line to remember. “Maybe you can have time now to sit and write.”