Cynical perhaps, but it feels safe to assume in 2025 that a majority of Americans do not know that Rhodesia was a country, let alone that it was a white colonial project. And of those who do know, too many are sadly white supremacists obsessed with a racial utopia that never was. This historical ignorance puts Sony Pictures Classics at a disadvantage with Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a film whose distribution strategy would indicate a desire to find a North American audience (and potentially some awards). The soft-spoken adaptation of white British-Rhodesian Alexandra Fuller’s notable memoir about a childhood with white supremacist colonialist parents amid the Zimbabwe War of Independence (also known as the Rhodesian Bush War) captures the war that ended white rule in the country formerly known as Rhodesia through the eyes of an entitled but big-hearted eight-year-old Alexandra (Lexi Venter), who goes by Bobo. White South African actor Embeth Davidtz steps behind the camera for the first time and plays with fire by centering a colonizer story with mostly white creatives while trying to digest the racial narratives of the time and liberate the little Alexandra from the myopic and racist worldview her parents brought her into.
Set in 1980, Fuller’s story is told entirely from the perspective of Bobo. Different forces fight for control of the country in the civil war, but Bobo only knows how to divide her world into “terrorists” and people with the same skin color as her and her family. Her mercenary-soldier father (Rob Van Vuuren) fights for the colonialist cause and leaves often to kill the “terrorists,” while her mother (also Davidtz) enforces apartheid as a police officer. She repeats and articulates the unspoken racist lessons of her parents through a voiceover track that fills in her still innocent thoughts on the world crumbling around her. Sarah (Zikhona Bali), the servant and mother-figure, meanwhile, tries her best to impart a different vision of humanity to the young girl.
The whole thing revolves around seven-year-old non-actor Venter, and she undeniably impresses in her first professional role. She spends her time wandering without aim through her family farm and marches all over the property of family-hired Black servant Sarah as if manifesting her parents’ entitled view of land and ownership. She walks in and out of Black spaces without warning, without respect, without apology. Of course, kids roam, but it’s also a more innocent microcosm of the military-enforced apartheid by the minority white-led government of Ian Smith and Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa, whose campaign is the main subject of many radio reports buzzing in the background.
South Africa-based cinematographer Willie Nel always has an eye to the sun and lets it work for him. The light falls on characters in the most beautiful ways and peaks through the cracks of wooden buildings. His Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) is the kind of pretty that only a child can see, and it also ingeniously confronts the horror of the colonial context. The world seems most deferential to the African colonial worlds of French filmmaker Claire Denis’ early works, and it would be a great surprise, perhaps an unbelievable one too, if that were unintentional.
Fuller’s memoir presumably has the advantage of mature reflection and worldview deconstruction, but this isn’t something Davidtz affords herself in the adaptation because she limits the story strictly to the eyes of a child who lacks the knowledge, tools, time, and ability to consider her family’s complicity in the racial violence critically. This is something the author, as an adult, appears to have worked on, but the filmic reflection is left to Nel’s observational camera and the jarring way Bobo innocently reiterates the violently and fearfully racist world her parents impart to her. Africans don’t have last names, she says, as if they weren’t human enough to merit them. It’s also not safe, she parrots her supremacist elders, to talk to Africans since they are all “terrorists,” could be terrorists, or are friends with terrorists. The strict child-perspective limits Davidtz’s ability to fully parse the consequences of the Rhodesian world, on both the colonizers and on Bobo, and this decision functions to provide an uncouth barrier of innocence to sanitize the war and the white supremacist causes for it. It’s also a miserably sad way to view the world and other races, yet the horrible sadness is not something that concerns Davidtz.
This perspective approaches disturbing territory when considered in context with the production’s worn and weathered places. These places were clearly once well-kept and bourgeois. A similar thing happens with her mom as she becomes an alcoholic and descends into an obsessive mania, or the white creepy family friend who assaults her sister in a public restroom. Something ruined these white spaces, something corrupted these white souls, and Bobo’s innocence-filtered perspective leaves a smidge of room for real-life white supremacists to come to the wrong conclusion about what destroyed Rhodesia. The final scene, with an affirmation of motherly love between Bobo and Sarah and, more importantly, Bobo’s ability to see her as African royalty through this love, tempers this and finally gives the film moral clarity. But the scene’s sharp break with realism also distracts and subdues its emotional impact.
Ultimately, this puts Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight in the strange position of resembling a more memorist imitation of early career (colonial-setting) Denis, but existing within a much, much narrower world. The narration ruins a similar meditative quality to the one Denis employed expertly in similar geographical contexts with Chocolat and Beau Travail, and that Davidtz (and Nel) seem to strive for here. Meanwhile, the film’s best features — the brilliant child perspective of Bobo and a roaming visual personality — feel at odds with one another. Maybe there is a genius to that formal clash that might reveal itself on repeat viewings, but more likely, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is just needlessly chasing its own tail.
DIRECTOR: Embeth Davidtz; CAST: Zikhona Bali, Illana Cilliers, Embeth Davidtz, Andreas Damm; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: July 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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