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Boy Called Twist, Director Tim Greene: Monkey Films/Twisted Pictures, 2005.
To watch Tim Greene's film, Boy Called Twist, is an exhilarating experience. Greene's provocative adaptation transfers Dickens's familiar story from the smoky streets of Victorian London to presentday South Africa, where sparkling white clouds race across the blue skies above Table Mountain. His film triumphantly sheds the corsets of costume drama while faithfully retaining the essential characters, plot and - most importantly - spirit of Dickens's original text. The film also pays respectful homage to the 1948 David Lean interpretation, which many still see as the gold standard for film adaptations of Dickens.
It is refreshing to find in Boy Called Twist a serious attempt to move a Dickens story into the twenty-first century. The fact that the time-shift works so well bears tragic testimony to the continuing relevance of Dickens's social concerns. The evidence is striking. As in nineteenth-century England, in Africa today there are millions of orphans: the AIDS pandemic has killed their parents. Children die not just from hunger and poverty but from the congenitally acquired disease. In Africa undertakers are doing brisk business: there is a strong demand for coffins, especially small ones. The worst problems are concentrated amongst the poor people of the townships, where support given by the Social Services is woefully inadequate. The widespread suffering is largely viewed with indifference by complacent and callous landowners and farmers, who are happy to exploit cheap child labour. Brutalised in the country, the children trek to the towns where they get caught up in street gangs. So much is documentary.
Greene's interpretation and the film's casting skilfully portray the complexities of life in today's South Africa. He uses the varied Cape Town racial mix to good effect, avoiding any simple black/white divisions. Fagin is a dread-locked Rastafarian figure, Mr Brownlow becomes Ebrahim Bassethen, a devout and respectable member of the Muslim community, Bill Sikes is a shaven-headed, white thug with black leathers and aggressively tattooed arms, Nancy a coloured prostitute. Fagin's gang is made up of 'strollers' - street kids that Greene found on the pavements of Cape Town, and who in real life...