Out of Africa

Out of Africa; romantic drama, USA / Kenya, 1985; D: Sydney Pollack, S: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen, Joseph Tiaka, Malick Bowens
1 9 1 3. In order to escape from her Danish homeland and her single boredom, Karen Blixen marries Baron Bror out of convenience in order to live with him in British colony Kenya on some farm, raising a plantation of coffee with Black people. Unfortunately, Bror has affairs and is absent from his home for months. When Karen gets contracted with syphilis, she returns to her homeland for treatment. Returning back to Africa, and now infertile, Karen starts running the plantation herself. She gains the sympathies of the natives and starts a relationship with the charming, but elusive adventurer Denys. When a fire destroys her plantation and Denys dies in a plane crash, she returns to her homeland.

Drama "Out of Africa" was based on true events from Karen Blixen's life whereby it applied honest, but sustained emotions that never turn sappy, appropriately blended into the romantic story, giving the audience a good, but not especially inspired film that's today slightly forgotten, and a one that after 2.5 hours of running time arrives nowhere. The landscapes of Kenya are wonderful, but are a weak equivalent for missing genius, brilliance or ingenuity—the cinematography makes the film look like a set of postcards without much of an intruiging story. "Out of Africa" unjustifiably won several awards as best film, beating the excellent movies "Witness", "Heaven Help Us" and "Back to the Future"—it's seems the academy loves sensitive or epic movies, but this time it was ready to even award an achievement that became slightly saccharine entertainment at times just to keep on with that rule. In exposition we find the heroine Karen hunting, angry because her lover Hans left her, so Bror ironically adds to her when she is shooting at a pheasant: "Just imagine that's Hans". Some scenes are bizarrely daring (and dangerous): a lion attacks a cow and Karen chases him off with a whip, while others are banal—a parade at night; Denys washes Karen's hair; Denys and Karen's car breaks in the middle of a meadow, so he fixes it—which is not that notable, even though the director Sydney Pollack managed to give it more palpable virtues than some other kitschy director would have. The best moment is when Denys arrives with a plane, Karen enters it ("When did you learn how to fly?" - "Yesterday!"), they fly over a lake with thousands of pink flamingos, and at one point they are in the clouds, and she reaches out her hand behind herself, touching with Denys, neatly showing how they are in "cloud number 9" from love. Rather overstretched, "Out of Africa" is good, but it simply lacks pathos.

Grade:++