In pre-apartheid times, Afrikaners used the word soutpiel – salt dick - as a general put down against English-speaking South Africans who were seen to have one foot in South Africa, the other in England, with their dick dangling in the ocean. Proteus is a little bit of a soutpiel, as it can’t decide wether it wants to be a brainy and beautiful costume epic, or quirky and polemic “New Queer Cinema”. Full of gorgeous camerawork and with a potentially fascinating story the film is undone by annoying and outdated touches that wouldn’t be out of place in Swoon or The Living End, films which Proteus' co-director John Greyson made mincemeat out ten years ago of with his excellent Zero Patience.
In 1725 Class Blank (Rouxnet Brown), a Khoi herder, is sentenced to a decade’s hard labour on Robben Island, Cape Town’s penal colony where Nelson Mandela would later spend almost thirty incarcerated years. An English botanist, Virgil Niven (Shaun Smith) runs the prison garden. With assistance from the prisoners, especially Claas, Niven hopes to catalogue and name South African native flowers.
Claas and Niven sense mutual sexual tension, though neither seems to be able to understand what this attraction exactly is. One of Claas’s fellow inmates is Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands), a Dutch sailor doing time on sodomy charges. Claas and Rijkhaart start meeting in the water tower for sex, and enjoy a decade long love affair. When Niven returns from Amsterdam many years later, an investigation into the homosexual activities on the penal island commences, and Claas and Rijkhaart go on trial for their lives.
Proteus is strong when it sticks to the story and shows off its marvellous camera work. Scenes at dusk, with prisoners casting fishing nets as the sky turns neon blue, or the brown and russet tones of Claas and Rijkhaart’s hessian and wood enclosed trysts, are absolutely beautiful – the film looks great.
The film wobbles each time Greyson and collaborator Jack Lewis try to play little tricks with time and style. Modern motor vehicles and a Greek chorus of chain-smoking, beehived stenographers straight out of the 1960s aren’t clever touches, they’re just incongruous and annoying affectations. Everytime such things appear, the film – which is otherwise quite classy – drops several levels and until they go away again we feel we’re suddenly watching a film student graduation project.
Using them to demonstrate that the film’s themes and concerns are universal and timeless, as the film makers have said, is artistic and intellectual simplicity at its worst. If a film’s themes and concerns are timeless, then this will be obvious to the audience. I don’t remember seeing Paul Scofield chatting on a portable phone during A Man For All Seasons or John Lone returning to the Forbidden City on rollerblades in The Last Emperor. It’s just gimmickry, and it’s horribly disappointing to see Greyson, who appeared to be a detached from the whole “New Queer Cinema” film-school approach of his early-Nineties peers, pick up this most dated and awkward approach so late in the game.
The other deadly incongruity here is Jack Lewis’ injection of turgid mid-Nineties Queer Theory and today’s notions of Gay Pride and homo identity. In the film’s press kit, Lewis references the work of Michel Foucault and states that “Proteus reminds … audiences that gay people have existed at all times and places, and often paid a price for their sexual orientation.” This is a mindless statement, as Lewis goes on to correctly point out that at the time in which Proteus is set, “gay” didn’t exist, and it is fairly common knowledge - even among Queer Theorists - that “gay people” haven’t "existed at all times and places", but, rather, sex between men has taken place continually, and the contexts of and responses to this behaviour have been varied and innumerable. Also, many women and straight men have met their doom over the millennia for adultery, jealousy, or scandalous sexual allegations. Sexual behaviour or sexual drives of all kinds have often landed people in hot water – paying a price for your sexuality or sex life isn’t a uniquely gay experience.
And in any case, the experiences of every homosexual who’s ever lived or the experiences of every male who’s done it with another man at any time and place since the end of the Ice Age cannot be bracketed under the umbrella of “gay” or any other word or idea. In Proteus, then, we don’t have a “gay love affair”, but something a little different, and I had hoped that the film would have explored these little differences.
So it’s a strange moment indeed when Rijkhaart turns to Claas at the film’s climax and implores him to “name” what it was they had together. Both characters, and everyone else in the scene, look on while Claas struggles to work out what his “lover” is talking about. So do we, in the audience, because we find it a little hard to believe that an Eighteenth Century sailor, though he may have been homosexual, would have espoused such a futuristic “Silence=Death” Gay Pride ethic.
