Lioness: A Mother Protecting Her Cubs Turns Into A Protector of Afrikaner Society
For the most part, the South African series Lioness (on Amazon Prime and MHz) is a gripping and solid critique of patriarchy but with a twist at the end that instead works to conceal rather than reveal the power at the core of Afrikaner society.
Samantha (Shannon Esra), as the series opens, is just being let out of prison where she has served eight years as co-conspirator with her husband in an attempt to defraud his clients. In a series of flashbacks that occur throughout the ten-episode season one, we learn that Samantha, who previously had lived a comfortable, gated life in an upper-middle class district of Cape Town, was framed and not part of the fraud her husband Adrien perpetrated.
Her goal, when she is freed from prison, is to reclaim her three children and clear her name, and in that order, which is part of what gives the series its dramatic impetus. Samantha’s attempt to reclaim her kids is as difficult as her struggle to find out how she was framed and clear herself. She is besieged on both the personal and social level.
Standing in the way of her goal are a host of men whose deception and constant deceit threaten her and her children. Her husband, the investment broker, is supposedly dead but there is some evidence that the middle boy, Liam, has seen him alive after his apparent suicide. (Liam is played by a star in the making, Joshua Daniel Eady, a budding cross between Fast Times at Ridgemont High’s vacant Sean Penn and a brooding but hunky Chris Hemsworth in Marvel’s Thor.) He may be dead, but his presence is still haunting her.
The living triumvirate which deceives Sam and covers up the crime of which she has been wrongly accused consists of an esteemed judge, another investment banker, and a cop, a veritable compendium of male Afrikaner power.
The judge may be the most self-serving. He has taken her kids, clearly knows something about the frame-up, and continues to lie to her to throw her off the trail. His wife is clinging and cloying, more male-identified in her aggressiveness than female, with her own insecurities threatening both Samantha and her children. Rather than dispensing justice, the judge’s role is to coordinate a cover-up and make sure the truth is not revealed.
The investment banker, her husband’s employee, participates in the cover-up to secure a promotion. Finally, the cop, an investigator, also charged nominally with getting to the truth, and who speaks Afrikaans, deceives Sam in a more personal way, at first sleeping with her when she catches him spying on her, and then arresting her in front of her kids as part of the fraud.
Adding to this male abuse of power, Sam’s oldest daughter goes through with an ill-fated wedding to a shady businessman with apparent connections to the underworld, who treats Miranda as his property once they are married. When caught, he says things like “I’m the only person who never abandoned you.” Caring on the surface, but just underneath insecure and willing to resort to violence to get what he wants.
The series moves at a rapid pace and Esra, nominated for best actress in a South African series, keeps it humming, driven in her twin goals and pursuing them even when it means breaking parole and being sent back to prison.
There are some problems. We see little of how the black population in Cape Town lives, but we can deduce something about the gap between their world and Samantha’s in that every household is gated. The most constant scene in the series is the opening and closing of these gates, unremarked upon symbols of the disparity between the two worlds, where one flaunts its wealth behind a layer of security.
Samantha’s encounter with the African population consists of her relationship with the bougie wife of the employee in her husband’s company who abandons her when she goes to prison, but ultimately throws off the societal view of Sam and, in a moment of cross-racial female bonding, comes to her rescue.
Her other friend is a black woman she met in prison who, out-of-prison, Samantha relies upon to get her fake IDs and guns. This character, one of her only allies, also perpetuates the Afrikaner fear of the black population who they ruled over and abused for centuries.
The main problem though occurs at the end which I will not give away except to say that Samantha gets what she wants and stands to get justice for her wrongful imprisonment when suddenly she changes course and, once the truth is exposed, seals it back up to protect everyone involved.
This is the old dramatic canard that, as the French director Jean Renoir said, “Everyone has their reasons.” It was that realization that helped Renoir create a series of complex characters but Renoir’s films, especially those of his ‘30s Popular Front period, also ultimately came down on the side of the downtrodden and against the power structure. Everyone has their reasons, but not everyone’s reasons are legitimate.
The application of this formula at the end of the series not only distorts and, in some sense, capsizes the critique of Afrikaner patriarchy, it also fails dramatically and leaves the spectator with the feeling that their time is wasted because in the end no one is guilty.
Lioness is a highly engaging series that, unfortunately, at the conclusion of season one covers up what it had spent the season revealing. The series begins as a critique of patriarchal power from the interior perspective of that society’s women and children. In the end, it loses its nerve and instead exhibits, unwittingly, how a segment of white South African society seals its lies and deceit to maintain power.
Dramatically the choice to have none of the men’s actions be villainous, sinks the second season, which, with the tension not resolved but concealed, makes it almost dramatically unfeasible to launch a new season and indeed the second season follows a very dull path.
