Some time for Tirza

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 September

I'd have to check, but I think that I briefly reported on seeing Tirza again - in fact, remembering the tag-line, I know that I did.

Tirza is the missing daughter of the main male character, Jörgen, and his distinctly unpleasant wife, who appears during the disappearance in a way that he does not seem able to do much about - she is much like the irresistible force, although not in the obvious sense. She does not have very much to say about Tirza's sister Ibi, but states her dislike for Tirza quite clearly, whereas, for Tirza's father, the opposite view is that she is the Sun Queen (and Tirza even has a disguised form of this name in the front of her diary).

That set me thinking a bit, rather belatedly, and led to an Internet search for want of any better way to find data in Festival central: a book on Akhenaton's wife Nefertiti calls her 'Egypt's Sun Queen', and shows the well-known statue of her head, which I was lucky enough to be in Berlin to see two years ago. (To be honest, it sounded more like something (wrong country!) out of Hans Christian Andersen, and maybe it is...)

Plenty of sun in Namibia, where Jörgen (pestered by telephone by his wife) goes in search of Tirza and her boyfriend Choukri, not least where he decides to head, out from Windhoek (the capital) into the desert known as Big Mama. Queen = Mother? (Sun Queen, not Sun Princess, anyway.)

Yet the real ray of sunlight that he finds is in another young life (Kaisa), who resists his attempts to search alone for the pair. And does she understand when he lapses into his native Dutch? According to Wikipedia, she might, since, although English became the official when the country gained independence in 1990, it seems that Afrikaans is widely understood. That said, Jörgen never tries his Dutch (even when he is failing to communicate in English, as happens several times), and he only talks aloud in it with Kaisa, when there is nothing to suggest whether she understands.

I may already have said that this film coalesces and coheres on a second viewing - some films just don't pass the test, because what you know at the end is inconsistent with the earlier part of the story, and you don't always know that until revisiting the territory. With a great film, a great story, it doesn't matter that you know where you are heading, because the journey there is beautifully done: oh, some mystery remains even then, but it strengthens one's conviction that it says something real about being human.