Semi-Soet

The Vintage That Almost Turned

Back in 2012, Afrikaans cinema wasn’t exactly overflowing with breezy, glossy crowd-pleasers. The landscape leaned more toward historical heaviness or broad slapstick. Then Joshua Rous came along with *Semi-Soet*. It arrived feeling a little like a local industry trying on the shape of a 2000s studio rom-com and seeing if it could make the outfit fit. The film takes those familiar fake-relationship bones and plants them among Johannesburg boardrooms and Franschhoek vineyards. I’ve always found that kind of genre translation interesting. Sometimes the imported structure feels stiff. Here, it bends just enough to work.



The premise is nonsense, but knowingly so. Jaci (Anel Alexander) is a hard-driving ad executive trying to keep her agency from being swallowed by a predator called "The Jackal." To land a huge account with a conservative wine estate obsessed with family values, she suddenly needs a fiancé. Through a mix-up outside a modeling agency, she ends up hiring the Jackal himself, JP Basson (Nico Panagio), to play the role. He agrees, because rom-com logic says he must. I don’t think the script ever fully smooths out why he goes along with it so easily, especially at the start, but Panagio has enough screen presence to make you stop asking questions.

Watch him in that first negotiation scene. Panagio usually trades on a kind of sturdy, untouchable calm, the same stoic authority South African audiences know from his *Survivor* hosting work. Here, he loosens it. Jaci is racing through a list of anxious demands, and he just cocks his head slightly, letting a slow, entertained smirk creep in. His whole body stays easy, almost heavy, which makes a perfect counterweight to Alexander’s fizzing, tightly wound energy. She moves like someone bracing for impact, shoulders tense, folders clutched like armor. The opposites-attract setup is old as dirt, but the physical contrast between them gives it real shape.



What helps *Semi-Soet* rise above its very familiar plot is how sincere it is. Rous doesn’t seem embarrassed by the softness of the material, and the Afrikaans dialogue has an easy naturalism that matters more than you might think. Reney Warrington’s old observation that the language feels "gemaklik en nie pretensieus nie" (comfortable and not pretentious) still holds. Once the story leaves the cool glass towers of Johannesburg and settles into the Vrede en Lust wine estate, the whole film loosens its tie. The pace softens. The camera starts lingering. Yes, some of the vineyard imagery brushes right up against tourism brochure territory, but it also gives the characters room to stop posturing and actually notice one another.

That said, the film definitely has blind spots.



The subplot with Jaci’s ex-fiancé Markus and his cartoonishly stereotyped girlfriend Chadrie (Diaan Lawrenson) feels like it wandered in from a cheaper and nastier movie. Those jokes rely on flat caricature in a way that sits awkwardly beside the tenderness slowly building between Jaci and JP. John Martin more or less nailed it when he said the film "doesn't look as well polished as many American romantic comedies do, it has more heart and more emotion than most of the stock standard ones." That sounds right to me. The comedy doesn’t always land cleanly, but the warmth is real.

Watching it now, especially with the knowledge that Alexander co-produced it with her late husband James, the whole thing carries an extra layer of affection. *Semi-Soet* isn’t trying to reinvent anything. It just wants to prove that this kind of romantic comedy can live comfortably on South African ground. A little uneven, yes. But it gets where it’s going.