★★★ (3 out of 4)
Seeing war through the eyes of a child is a tough task for any filmmaker. But South African actress Embeth Davidtz (“Schindler’s List,” “Californication”), in a striking and assured debut as a writer-director, pulls it off beautifully in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.” Based on Alexandra Fuller’s bestselling 2001 memoir about herself as a little girl growing up amid the tumult of the 1980 civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, the film is alive with the friction that came with the election that voted the Black majority into power. The girl’s white colonial parents didn’t like that one bit.
Davidtz would be the first to admit that she had the help of a sorceress. Her name is Lexi Venter, only seven when the film—her first—was shot in South Africa, but possessed of the humor, heart and specificity of a born virtuoso. Venter plays Bobo—Fuller’s nickname—a child less concerned with political change than the threat of a good washing or a comb painfully untangling her blonde curls. Bobo—a tree-climbing, dog-loving, chain-smoking, rifle-carrying dirt bike rider—is literally hell of wheels.
Davidtz plays Bobo’s alcoholic mother Nicola, personally devastated by the drowning death of her youngest daughter and overcome by her country’s power shift. A former police officer, Nicola lives in fear of Black terrorist attacks on whites—often shown on TV—repeated on her own farm. Ready to retaliate, she keeps a rifle near her bed. Fuller lived in Burma Valley, the center of it all. Though the child in her couldn’t understand the deeper implications of the time, she could feel the vibrations of racism all around her.
It's Bobo’s voiceover that gives us our bearings as she reflects the views of her parents, including her mostly absent soldier father (Rob van Vuuren), through her bossy attitude toward Black people in her sphere. “Africans don’t have last names,” she states with unthinking bigotry. Her white privilege was carefully taught by the example of her elders.
You can feel Bobo’s affection for her Black servants, Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and Jacob (Funamni Shilubana)—both excellent—though she dehumanizes them at every turn. You can rightly criticize Davidtz for telling a Black story through the eyes of bigoted white girl; yet she brings her points across without sermonizing, letting us draw our own conclusions from the sights we see. Those images include Blacks being forced into servitude and to vote for white-backed candidates. That Bobo sees this as business as usual creates a chilling effect.
Sarah, beautifully played by Bali, tries in her own way to let Bobo understand that kids are kids no matter their skin color and both alike in dignity. The lesson doesn’t go down easy, yet it allows a child to grow a conscience and develop beliefs she doesn’t share with her parents.
I’m reminded of a Stephen Sondheim lyric that cuts to the core of the story Davidtz is telling:
“Careful the things you say/Children will listen
Careful the things you do/Children will see and learn
Children may not obey/but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn, to learn what to be
Careful before you say, ‘Listen to me’
Children will listen”
Everything in that lyric cuts to core of the Davidtz film and the indelible portrayal of young Venter in one of the best performances ever delivered by a child actor. Bobo did listen but defied her parents by learning what not to be. So even when “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” trips over bumps on its narrative road, that lesson comes through loud and clear.