O is for Out of Africa

O is for Out of Africa, winner of Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards for screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. The story is based on the life of Karen Blixen. It is a sweeping epic that takes place in Kenya. The film also took honors at the Academy Awards by winning Best Picture, Best Director for Sydney Pollack, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction–Set Decoration, Best Sound, and Best Original Score composed by John Barry.

Karen Blixen published under the pen name of Isak Dineson. Her stories and memoirs are now considered to be classics by this extraordinary woman living ahead of her time. (She wrote the story Babette’s Feast, which was made into a film that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Denmark in 1987.)

Out of Africa is rated PG. The film is a whopping 2 hours and 41 minutes, but as I watched it again, it didn’t seem that long. It is an engrossing story of a time past when Africa was still colonized and relationships between native peoples and the ruling elite was ruled by etiquette and a sense of place, as misbegotten as that was.

Karen (Meryl Streep) is a Danish woman, independent and headstrong. She seems a bit bored, and ends up marrying Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), the brother of a former lover. They decide to buy a farm in Africa in 1913. Bror arrives in Africa first and has without Karen’s knowledge bought a coffee plantation instead of a dairy farm.

They begin their life in the strange new land with all the conveniences from Denmark Karen brought with her, and their home is elegant and civilized. Early on she meets Denys (Robert Redford), a man equally as forward and outspoken as Karen herself. They fall in love and all sorts of complications develop. Since Bror has already been unfaithful to her, she has no qualms about taking up with Denys. The relationships Karen has with others, whether the men in her life or the native workers subjugated in their own land, are often fraught with drama alternating with tenderness and genuine caring.

The vistas of the savannahs with its abundant wildlife are photographed so beautifully. The story lingers over the safaris that Karen and Denys take together for some wonderful scenes of this place so unlike the country she left behind in Denmark.

Kenya was a harsh place for women at the time, but Karen would not allow herself to be intimidated. I highly recommend Out of Africa. If you saw it a long time ago, perhaps at the time of its release in 1985, watch it again. You won’t be disappointed. It was one of my mother’s favorite films, and I got to thinking as I watched it again how she admired the strong willed and independent woman on screen, in charge of her own destiny, for better or worse.

Have you seen Out of Africa? What did you think of the depiction of that time period in Kenya?

Out of Africa - Official Trailer