A Northern Affair

Recently we have been barraged by a lot of movies that use a lot of ‘silence’. By ‘silence’ I mean vacant spaces in the transitions from scene to scene or within the scenes themselves where music is lacking and all we have is pin-drop-silence.

The first time I specifically remember noticing silence in our movies was in Leila Djansi’s “Ties that Bind”. Back then I thought it was interesting, and the movie had enough energy and force that the silence just served to reinforce. Of recent, I don’t feel the same and most of this silence almost always transforms into boredom at one point or the other. So as you might guess the first thing that stood out to me about “a northern affair” was the silence. My first question therefore was “is this silence going to have an identifiable use or is it going to become tedious”?

A Northern Affair is the story of a nurse who meets a reclusive doctor on her assignment in the north. The nurse, played by Joselyn Dumas, is met with hostility after the doctor, played by John Dumelo, realizes that his new help is a female. Things between them eventually spiral, as is expected, into a romantic relationship.

A couple of things are a given right from the start such as that the nurse will eventually fall in love with the doctor and vice versa. That the stoic doctor has some scarring emotional baggage causing his reclusion, and finally that a movie that has the happily ever after bit after only about 30 minutes is bound to have a twist in the storyline.

Joselyn plays a self-sufficient career-minded young woman who is undeterred by the doctor’s constant negative remarks. On the surface she is strong, independent and resilient but as the movie goes on you realize that she has her trials. Joselyn Dumas pulls off the character and brings enough to the table that the movie floats. The performance is not spectacular but then again neither is it an under-performance on her part. I see her trials but I don’t really empathize. And this is not solely the fault of Ms. Dumas but the entire ambiance of the movie doesn’t really create a mood that promotes empathy.

The same basic concept applies to John Dumelo as well. John Dumelo is an actor that hardly ever evokes any solid emotion in me. However, in this movie, he presented enough ‘broken’ when necessary that I believed him. When he says the he ‘loved’, I believed that he ‘loved’, and like Ms. Dumas his performance was concrete enough to conviction but not emotionally engaging.

The emotional aspect was really lacking in this movie for me and I’m moved to say that maybe if there was more music used that the movie could have had more of an impact than it did. It does become a bit awkward when ten to fifteen minutes into a movie two people who hated each other a couple of minutes ago are kissing with the chirping of crickets as their background music.

Even though the silence was a persistent demotivating aspect of the movie, there were some definite perks. The movie does bring up some valid social issues. However, I felt that I could have been more fired up about them than I ended up being. The movie has beautiful cinematography and photography. I imagine that the gem of the movie was supposed to be built around it’s simplicity as a love story but that gets lost somewhere in between.

There are genuine moments between John and Joselyn’s characters that serve as the petrol that fuels this movie. This petrol, however, is occasionally doused by things like the poor acting from Jon Germain or the incessant silence.

Even though silence is not an aspect of movies that we are particularly receptive to or accustomed to it is not necessarily always a bad thing. It takes great skill to make a movie without music. In order to create that tension that music usually creates, many other aspects of the movie will have to be significantly well done. This movie missed that mark because the tension was absent. This was probably because the source of the tension – the antagonist, played by Jon Germain – did not do a good enough job in helping to set up the conflict.