Hide Article Text (OCR)
Tacklingapartheidagain on filmBy Jim EmersonThe Registerow can just one movie effectively dramatize a bureaucratic system of oppression on the overwhelming scale of apartheid in South Africa? How do you fit this kind of enormous, institutionalized political injustice into a two-hour motion picture without trivializing it or turning it into an abstraction or both?Those films that have attempted to show apartheid through the eyes of individual white Afrikaners and their families, using the rationale that such figures (played by well-known actors) are easier for white audiences in the United States and Europe to identify with, invariably trivialize the basic nature of apartheid (and point up the thinking behind many financial and “creative” decisions in the US movie industry). Whites are not the primary victims of apartheid (though in a larger moral-ethical sense, everybody is), but white movie-go-ers are the prime targets of film financiers.On the other hand, attempts to show the■V.v ' '. rtf’ lt;: ;':JsrgrssgaREVIEWThe film: “A Dry White Season.”Starring: Donald Sutherland, Zakes Mokae, Janet Suzman, Jurgen Prochnow, Susan Sarandon, Marlon Brando, Winston Ntshona, Thoko Ntshinaa John Kani.Behind the scenes: Directed by Euzhan Palcy. Screenplay by Colin Welland and Euzhan Palcy, based on the novel by Andre Brink.Playing: Opens today in theaters throughout Orange County.Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.Rated: R, violence, language.devastating scope of an economically ex-Ploitive, corrupt government that denies human rights on a massive scale — that maintains power by massacring children, torturing and murdering dissenters — run the risk of numbing an audience, of turning the policies of apartheid and the flesh-and-blood victims of those policies into simplistic moral abstractions of good and evil.In depicting a value system based on dehumanization — whether apartheid or the Nazi Holocaust - it’s vitally important that the victims and the perpetrators remain recognizably human.Euzhan’s Palcy’s exceptionally well-acted “A Dry White Season” has many of the strengths and problems of other anti-apartheid pictures. It is an undeniably powerful and moving tale (given the inherent humandrama of the subject, how could it not be?), but it also — perhaps unavoidably — struggles to fit the problems of apartheid into the contours of a fairly conventional, if diffuse thriller story line.“No one can be free until all are free” is the message that appears on the screen at a climactic moment in the film. And, as “A Dry White Season” demonstrates, that essential truth (some might try to dismiss it as a platitude) is almost as challenging to dramatize as it is to live up to.Like the two most prominent anti-apartheid dramas of the past couple years — Richard Attenborough’s “Cry Freedom” and Chris Menges’ “A World Apart” — “A Dry White Season” gives us a relatively wealthy, white Afrikaner protagonist who once the horrors of apartheid are (literally) brought home, is compelled by basic human decency — and righteous outrage— to join the fight against it.In “A Dry White Season,” Ben du Toit (Sutherland), a stable and complacent family man and history teacher, attempts to discover what happened to his black gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), and Gordon’s young son Jonathan (Bekhithemba Mpofu) after both are arrested by the police and disappear into the corrupt South African bureaucracy.Ben’s crusade for justice on behalf of these two becomes a metaphor for a largerpolitical and moral battle being fought in South Africa.“A Dry White Season” does a more effective job than its predecessors in suggesting the wider political context of apartheid. Whereas “Cry Freedom” rather pompously lectured its audience and “A World Apart drew (sometimes ludicrous and offensive) parallels between the ostracism of a white schoolgirl and South Africa’s political system of racial segregation and discrimination, “A Dry White Season” is more successful at embodying its princi-pies, dramatic and political, in the movie’s major characters.At first, Ben is content to believe, like his privileged white acquaintances, that even good, church-going” people like Gordon and Jonathan wouldn’t have been arrested unless they had done something wrong. And besides, he tries to convince himself the innocent have nothing to fear.When Jonathan disappears, after a peaceful demonstration by black schoolchildren to protest substandard public education turns into a massacre, Ben tells Gordon: “It’s a terrible thing, but there’s really nothing more we can do.”Gradually, Ben realizes that this convenient, impotent pose is just an excuse for moral cowardice. Later, he joins forces with Gordon’s wife, Emily (Thoko Ntshinga), and Stanley (Zakes Mokae), a taxi driver, to discover the truth behind the disappearance of Jonathan and Gordon.As Ben becomes more committed to his fight, his family is polarized, then torn apart. Only his son, Johan (Rowen Elmes) a friend of Jonathan’s, stands by him. “Do you think they (blacks) will let us go on living our quiet, peaceful lives if they win?” argues Ben’s wife, Susan (Janet Suzman), in a pathetic attempt to justify her own passive acceptance of apartheid.Like so many South African whites, Susan tries to skirt the real issues by viewing life in detached, black-white, us-them terms: “You are not one of them, and they don’t want you to be,” she tells her husband, who is eventually labeled a “Kaffir-lover,” a communist and a traitor for persisting with his charges against the South African police.Susan thinks whites are the only ones who can maintain law and order — “Look at the rest of the country. It’s a mess” — not unlike those Italians who liked Mussolini because he kept the trains running on time, even if he was a dictator.Co-writer-director Palcy (“Sugar Cane Alley ) has tried to open up the novel, which was seen entirely through Ben’s (blue) eyes, and give the Ngubene family a more prominent role. Some of the racistg A, ^remain caricatures — either grotesquely bloated and sweaty or, in the case of Jurgen Prochnow’s icy Capt . Stoltz, a sort of Skeletor in suit and tie. And the photojournalist played by Susan Sarandon barely registers as a character at all.Marlon Brando (now approximately half as large as South Africa itself), is wonderful in a two-scene cameo as barrister Ian McKenzie, an idealistic but battered old man who continues to fight the good fight, even though he knows the effort is futile. Justice and law, he says with a sigh, are distant cousins... and here in South Africa, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.”Ihese scenes, where McKenzie outlines an absurd, nightmarish world in which the rules ol justice and fairness don’t apply, are the closest the movie comes to Kafka esque black comedy — and they suggest a new and potentially more fruitful direction lor anti-apartheid movies to explore.
Newspaper Details
Santa Ana Orange County Register
Santa Ana, California, US
Fri, Oct 06, 1989
Page 68
Full Page
Clipped by
Rotten T.
USA 28 Dec 2022
Other Publications Near Santa Ana, California
Santa Ana Pacific Weekly Blade
Santa Ana Excelsior
Santa Ana News
Santa Ana Evening Blade
Santa Ana Orange County Register Evening
