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In a spin-off to the juvenile 2007 comedy Poena is Koning, comes the misadventures of Vaatjie Venter, a talented pastry chef and the top student at the hotel school where he is training. He soon becomes the lead candidate to win a scholarship to train under world-famous master chef Pierre Cousteau in Paris. But Vaatjie's charmed life is tested to its limits when his jealous classmate James tries everything in his power to prevent Vaatjie from winning the opportunity of a lifetime.
The tone of this movie is set within the first two minutes. We are introduced to protagonist Vaatjie Venter as he is awoken by the sound (and smell) of his own fart. As he gets out of his karavaan, parked in the backyard of his parent’s Gauteng home, he steps in a pile of dog shit.
Although Vaatjie calls his karavaan home, he is no wash out. He is the top student at the local hotel school and has been awarded a 10-week scholarship in Paris (the real one in France, not the Free State).
Enter antagonist James who does not like that the “vetgat boer” is off overseas, while he's due to complete his internship in a Benoni hotel.
In one scene James squashes Vaatjie’s culinary masterpiece, which looks more like a cake a four-year-old threw up than the product of a pastry chef extraordinaire. It figures, considering the Kook and Geniet stands proudly mounted on the desk of the school’s principal, Ms Mammabolo. Not quite the quintessential guide to gourmet cooking.
The evil James frames Vaatjie for theft and gets him kicked out of the school, hoping to bring himself in contention for the French scholarship. Luckily Vaatjie has a supportive father, Wors Venter (Willie Esterhuizen), who believes in his son’s innocence and decides to call in some professional legal help.
But alas! The odds are stacked against poor Vaatjie and he is soon found guilty by a judge more interested in the sexy prosecutor than the evidence before him. Vaatjie Sien Sy Gat is the story of a poor white Afrikaans-speaking youth battling against the forces of the new South Africa that are bent on destroying him.
You would be hard pressed to find a movie more saturated with racial stereotypes (or any other stereotype for that matter). When Esterhuizen did it in his 1994 comedy Lipstiek Dipstiek, it was in a country still coming to terms with itself, where people could use a laugh at their own expense.
The police, the courts, the criminals – everybody is out to get poor Vaatjie. The rest of Africa is also part of the plot to destroy the poor white boy’s life. After being conned and imprisoned by a corrupt Botswana border official, he curls naked into a foetal position to decry his lot - after all he had done nothing wrong!
However, delving into the (alleged) paranoia of the Afrikaner psyche is going beyond this movie’s worth.
Bad acting. Bad plot. Bad production. Bad themes. Bad jokes. It makes one wonder: what is the point? (The only fun in this movie is trying to spot the number of product placements.)
