Perhaps one of the most enduringly beautiful love stories ever told on cinema, Out of Africa, made in 1985 by the late and great Sydney Pollack, continues to captivate both the heart and the mind almost two decades later.
Based on Karen Blixen memoirs of the time when she had a coffee plantation in Kenya, the film begins with the famous opening line: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” And so begins the story of one exceptional woman’s journey to find herself the kind of life she had always hoped to lead, but couldn’t in her richly comfortable but sheltered life in Denmark.
Karen Blixen who is also known as Isak Dinesen, the famous writer, is played in this film by the divinely talented Meryl Streep in perhaps the performance of her life. Streep fleshes out Blixen’s strengths, her vulnerabilities, her headstrong charm, finding her somehow, a voice that is both richly modulated, gravely witty, charmingly accented, and with a low pitch that is entirely different from Streep’s own normal speaking voice. Perhaps in some ways it can be said that this voice that Streep has so painstakingly constructed is the defining aspect of the film, which starts and ends with Karen Blixen’s own words.
Blixen was a storyteller before she became a writer, her ability to spin a tale out of almost anything being one of her chief charms. But when she arrives in Africa with her bone china, her cuckoo clock, her books, and her silver cutlery, she is emblematic of the kind of insular coloniser who lands on a strange and wild country, clueless to her surroundings, wanting only her creature comforts, but also the romance that is indelibly linked to the African continent.
Slowly, as she struggles with her failing coffee crop, the Kikuyu tribe that live and farm on her 4,000 acres, and with her husband Baron Bror Blixen who she married solely so that she may have the freedom to travel to Africa, Karen comes into her own in a series of beautifully photographed vignettes, depicting in ravishing detail Blixen’s love affair with the continent – which becomes a character in and of itself.
Among these African hills, Blixen falls in love with Denys Finch Hatton (played by the strikingly handsome Robert Redford), a free spirited game hunter who knows Africa for what it is, a land that is blessed with beauty and bounty, but on the verge of change.
Over the course of the First World War, both Bror and Denys go off to fight for the British army on the African frontier, leaving Karen to deal with the plantation on her own. During this time, we begin to see the other love story in this carefully crafted, subtly nuanced, wonderfully written film: the love story between Karen Blixen and the majordomo of her household Farah (played in a delightfully humourous and sensitive manner by Malick Bowens). Throughout Blixen’s stay in Africa, Farah remains by her side, through Bror’s philandering, Denys’s erratic comings and goings, natural disasters, a bout of syphilis, and many other tribulations.
Karen and Farah’s relationship, strictly platonic, is a true meeting of the minds, with Farah’s quiet stoic manner balancing Karen’s determination and verve, and while Karen’s soaring, passionate relationship with Denys is the heart of the film, undeniably Farah and Karen’s friendship is just as poignant.
When Karen leaves Africa, having lost everything, she asks Farah to call her by her name. He does and she leaves - near perfect ending to a film about love, loss, the adventurous spirit, and the enduring bravery of an exceptional woman.