Black Butterflies

Plot

The film is a depiction of the life of Ingrid Jonker (1933–65) (played by Carice Van Houten), an Afrikaner. As the movie opens, Ingrid and her sister (both young girls) are living with their grandmother. They are happy but quite poor, lacking even a pair of shoes. After their grandmother dies, their father (Abraham Jonker, played by Rutger Hauer) comes to collect Ingrid and her sister to live with him. He assigns them rooms in the servants' quarters, rather than where the family lives. Later Ingrid marries, and gives birth to a daughter, but Ingrid is unhappy with her husband (having married him only to escape her father) and the marriage is short-lived.

The author Jack Cope (played by Liam Cunningham) enters the movie when Ingrid is swimming and finds herself unable to swim back to shore against the high waves and current. A man on shore hears her pleas for help and spontaneously dives into the water to save her. He turns out to be Jack Cope. As it happens, Ingrid had read and enjoyed his first novel and he was an admirer of her poems. He calls her to invite her to a party with many friends, and so begins their love affair. It is passionate and they are deeply in love. But Jack refuses to marry her. He doesn't say why (perhaps it is her attractions to, and flirtatious ways with, other men when she professes love to Jack [her sexual liberation before the sexual revolution]; perhaps it is how all consuming their passionate love and lovemaking is so that Jack finds himself unable to write [he says being with Ingrid "drains him"] though Ingrid's poems seem to keep flowing). He announces he will visit his two sons for 2 or 3 months (which will also include seeing their mother, who is still his wife, since his divorce from her was not yet finalized; the visit is partly so that he can start writing again). Ingrid is distraught at their being apart for so long and begs him not to go. At the train when he departs she begs him yet again not go to or to take her with him. It turns out that Ingrid was pregnant with Jack's child, though he did not know. While he is gone, she has an abortion. After he has been gone some time, Ingrid receives a phone call from him where she learns that he will be away for another month. In her sadness and anger at that news, she seduces a young writer (called Eugene Maritz in the movie and played by Nicholas Pauling, though in real life the writer's name was André Brink). In the movie, Eugene was a huge fan of Ingrid's poetry, and the playwright, Uys Krige (played by Graham Clarke), had just lauded Eugene as a huge new literary talent. When Jack returns, he finds a pair of Eugene's shoes in his closet, and kicks Ingrid out, though she comes back into his life many more times though only once more as his lover A pivotal scene in the movie (and in Ingrid's real life, though there it occurred much later there) is when Ingrid and Jack witness the police shoot into a car, killing a black child. This leads to Ingrid's famous poem, Die Kind, which is alluded to multiple times in the movie; a recording of Nelson Mandela's reading of it in his address to the first democratically elected parliament is played at the end of the film. A subtext running throughout the film is apartheid, its horrors, Ingrid and Jack's opposition to it, but Ingrid father's strong, unwavering support of it. Ingrid's father was Chair of the parliamentary select committee responsible for censorship laws on art, publications and entertainment. He is a cold, formal, tyrannical man, who never shows Ingrid any affection. He is grieved and embarrassed by Ingrid's opposition to his political views, support of writers whose work he has censored from publication, and her own writings. At one point in the movie she asks him to read a poem she is particularly proud of; he reads most of the beautiful poem out loud, but is unable to stomach reading the whole poem and rips it up. His rejections of his daughter throughout her life are extremely hard on her, and make her later rejections by Jack and Eugene also particularly hard on her. At one point her sadness and depression land her in Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital (where her mother had died several years earlier.) When Jack visits her there he learns for the first time that she had been pregnant with his child. It is a very moving scene. He asks why she had not told him. She says she tried to but if she had he would have married her (and unsaid but understood: she would not have wanted him to marry her for that reason though she had very much wanted him to marry her). Ingrid also tells him that they have taken all her poems away. Jack looks through the box of her possessions that the hospital has and finds a whole pocketbook stuffed full of poems Ingrid had written. He takes them. Jack and Uys cannot get over how good the poems are and stay up day and night feverishly working to compile them into a book for publication. Out of the hospital, Ingrid is thrilled when the book gets accepted by a publisher and dedicates the book to Jack and Uys. The book gets extraordinarily positive reviews, gets nominated for an extremely prestigious award (called the APB award in the movie), wins that award, and as part of winning that, Ingrid gets to go to Europe for the first time. (That book was Rook en oker and the prize was the Afrikaans Press-Booksellers literary prize.) Ingrid goes to see her father in his government office to tell him the wonderful news about the huge honor she has just received and to ask her father if he would accompany her to receive it, saying it would mean a great deal to her. Her father does not congratulate her, informs her he already knew about the award, he saw nothing good in the book, had wanted to ban it and only had not done so because colleagues argued it would cause too much of a scandal, and to top it all off informs her he never wants to see her again. Ingrid would have liked Jack to accompany her to Europe, and he would have, but the government would not issue him a passport because of his anti-apartheid views and advocacy. So Ingrid invites Eugene to accompany her, which he does. During the trip he finds her writing a poem that states how much she loves Jack, which understandably hurts and upsets him; he announces he will be returning to South Africa soon. Ingrid's depression leads her to try to take her own life. The hospital in Europe calls her father to ask for permission to give Ingrid electroconvulsive shock therapy. He gives his permission. That essentially ends her life because after that she is no longer able to write (whereas throughout the entire movie she had written prolifically throughout her life since childhood) and she is expressionless, never smiling again (whereas throughout most of the movie she had been brimming over with life and strong emotions). Before she commits suicide by walking into the ocean, she goes over to Jack's home and brings him her AFB medal along with a moving poem she had just written to Jack about her love for him and taking her life.

Cast

Reception

It holds a score of 73% on Rotten Tomatoes.