Foreplay

This is yet another adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's sexual daisychain 'La Ronde'. Writer/director Paul Grootboom's version is transposed to his native South Africa, but the conclusion is as banal as ever: people have lots of sex, sex is a great leveller, everybody is a fucking whore.
What you get from Grootboom's work - as anyone who saw the electrifying 'Township Stories' will testify - is an earthy, unpretentious spirit and fiercely committed performances. When Koketso Mojela's barmaid and Mandla Gaduka's student flirt in his mother's shebeen, we feel like we're watching real people, not clichés. But there's plenty to be troubled by elsewhere, not least when a bully-boy politician (presumably meant to represent new president Jacob Zuma) anally rapes a prostitute. It's a gratuitously explicit scene, played out for real by two screaming, grunting actors to nobody's edification. Grootboom's cynical take on South African life depicts a society in which sex crosses class lines, is cheaply come by and often violently applied. That's an unsurprising perspective, which 'Foreplay' requires ten more or less predictable vignettes and two hours to establish.