Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1985) covers the Kenyan years of the Danish writer Karen Blixen. She goes to Africa through a marriage of arrangement, starts a coffee farm, and is left alone when the marriage fails. Then comes her relationship with the hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton, who never stays, which is the whole condition of it. The source is the memoir Blixen wrote as Isak Dinesen, together with two biographies. Sydney Pollack directed. Meryl Streep plays Blixen, Robert Redford plays Finch Hatton and Klaus Maria Brandauer her husband. Streep uses a Danish accent, one of the most discussed technical choices in the film. It won seven Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Sound and Original Score. The music is by John Barry. David Watkin shot it, and the flying sequence in which Finch Hatton takes Blixen over Kenya has been a benchmark for landscape photography for forty years. It runs 161 minutes. Good for: classical epic romance, landscape cinema, and Streep. Less good for: the film sees colonial Kenya through white farm owners, and the Kikuyu characters remain largely in the background; that criticism has been made for years and it lands. It is 161 minutes and very slow.