On paper Low Rider sounds like fun: a grieving Londoner goes on a road trip across South Africa in order to connect with her father. Unfortunately Low Rider manages to take this solid concept and make it as dull and cliched as possible. People don’t talk with each other, but instead delivery lectures about the validity of their feelings. Incidents don’t happen so much as how-to-write-a-screenplay marks must be hit. And the movie treats the Westerner as the hero when it’s the other way around. In every sense Low Rider is not a real goer.
Careless party girl Quinn (Emma McDonald) is bored and depressed in London after the death of her mother, so hops on a plane to Johannesburg to find her dad. They haven’t spoken in years, but she has a couple of old pictures and a few old addresses, so how hard can it be? She is surprisingly surprised that it’s not so simple. A night in a club with a pretty lady is a great deal of fun, but the morning after less so: Quinn’s wallet and phone are gone. Fortunately she still has the card of a guy from the club, Harley (Thishiwe Ziqubu), a preposterously obliging young man happy to drive Quinn wherever she needs to go, which seems to be in the direction of Cape Town. So off they pop.
Now. This is not Quinn’s first time in the country, but she wanders around with seemingly no regard that being mixed race in South Africa is a different issue than it is in the UK. Harley not only has to do all the driving but also spend an enormous amount of energy trying to scold some sense into her. At times Quinn is so recklessly indifferent to society’s rules that she gets away with breaking them because her attitude is dangerous to everyone. But not even all the scary white people they encounter, even the ones shooting at them, wises her up. When director Campbell X spoke at BFI Flare he said this was deliberate; he and co-writer Stephen Strachan wanted to tell a story of struggling with your identity from the perspective of someone messy, someone with a huge appetite for drama. The trouble is that once you are over your teenage years this outlook should leave you numb. It also focuses the attention on the least interesting person here. We learn so, so much about Quinn’s biracial identity and barely anything at all about Harley being trans. A movie focusing on a trans person in Africa would have been new! A road trip where a privileged European sits down and shuts up so a working-class queer trans person of color from the global south can shine would have been so much more interesting.
So the question is why this movie was made at all. Well, there aren’t as many black British movies as you would think, and working in South Africa is cheap. But for all the time we spend in Harley’s truck, we get very little sense of the world they’re passing through. The interactions with other people feel so forced and staged that they’re of minimal interest. Mr. Ziqubu is by far the best thing about the movie, but has so little to work with that it’s kind of embarrassing. The fact Harley is sidelined at the finale, in which Quinn uses a queer safe house to make everything about herself again, is even more embarrassing. The joker-ish connotations of the names of the leading pair don’t serve any visible purpose, either. The overall feeling is one of wasted opportunities, selfishness, and exploitation of the good will of some of the most disadvantaged people on earth. This leaves me no choice but to say all my friends should avoid Low Rider.
Low Rider recently played at BFI Flare.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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