Monthly Archives: July 2016

  • A World Apart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chris Menges (1988)

    The directing debut of Chris Menges, Oscar-winning cameraman of The Killing Fields and The Mission, is based on the life of Ruth First, the white South African anti-apartheid activist and journalist – renamed in the film as Diana Roth (Barbara Hershey).  In the opening scene, Diana’s husband (Jeroen Krabbé) leaves the family to go into exile and avoid the fate of the ANC leaders Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, who have been arrested and are currently awaiting trial.  Diana remains in Johannesburg to sustain the Roths’ political campaign and look after their three daughters.  A World Apart explores Diana’s difficulties in reconciling the increasingly conflicting claims of political conscience and maternal obligation.  Set in 1963, the story is told mainly from the point of view of the Roths’ eldest daughter, Molly (Jodhi May), in whom personal emotional response and a nascent political consciousness are powerfully confused.  Molly is not only virtually orphaned by her father’s exile and her mother’s consecutive periods in custody under the newly-implemented 90-Day Act (which empowered the South African authorities to hold persons arrested for up to ninety days without trial).  This barely teenage girl also sees how the family life of the Roths’ black maid Elsie (Linda Mvusi), whom Molly loves, is wrecked by a system that separates her from her children, who remain in a township, and by a regime that tortures and kills Elsie’s brother, Solomon (Albee Lesotho), with whose funeral the film ends.

    Described in this way, Shawn Slovo’s screenplay sounds too schematic.  The film doesn’t feel schematic, though, thanks to the blood-boiling emotive power of the subject and the visual sensitivity of Chris Menges and his cinematographer, Peter Biziou.  A sequence such as the family meal, when Molly visits the township, is almost perfectly realised:  Menges encourages but doesn’t force sympathy and admiration for the Africans; and Jodhi May’s eager, thoughtful presence prevents the scene from becoming merely documentary – we can observe and feel with Molly both the strangeness and the easy dignity and strength of the ritual.  The famous lush beauty and coloration of South Africa are used to emphasise the incongruity of the moral hideousness of apartheid.  There’s a recurring image of sleek black police cars snaking up the sunny roads:  by the end of the film, these blots on the landscape are turning up like an inevitable bad joke and the cars’ occupants come across as malign Keystone Cops.

    Jodhi May’s gawky adolescent plainness is very touching and Menges knows how to get the most out of it.  In an early scene in a flamenco dancing class, Molly is taller and looks older than the other girls; her physical precocity anticipates our realisation that her moral development is being uncontrollably accelerated too.  Jodhi May hasn’t quite grown into her frame and Molly is caught up in emotional currents beyond her years and understanding.  It’s a wonderful piece of casting and a lovely piece of acting.  As Elsie, Linda Mvusi is extraordinarily physically expressive, especially when she runs aimlessly, frantically through the Roths’ garden, wailing at the news of Solomon’s death.  Elsewhere, though, directing the performers is Menges’ weakness.  The actor in the role of the father of Molly’s best friend – in a scene in which he refuses to let Molly come into his house, literally drags her into his car and returns her to her own home – plays strictly according to the formula of his part:  a white South African not brave enough to challenge the system and therefore a contemptible nasty.   It’s an understandable (indeed appealing) error of judgment but an error of judgment all the same.  If the actor had concentrated more on his character’s fearfulness he might have succeeded in making a stronger point about the humiliating effects of the apartheid system on whites.  This is by no means the only example of its kind:  with the exception of David Suchet, those playing Diana Roth’s prison interrogators overdo the vicious relish (and Suchet isn’t a character – he’s purely a conscience).   A World Apart is much more effective when, for example, Molly yells at two policemen to go away and leave her family alone:  we don’t even see her tormentors’ faces but we hear their reaction to her intense emotion – a small grunt of derisive laughter.

    These shortcomings in the acting are linked to the subject of the film.  Barbara Hershey’s misconceived performance as Diana is a less explicable and more damaging liability.  The actress in this role needs to communicate the mother-activist’s guilty, divided feelings – there’s a crucial loss of tension if the audience isn’t unsure whether Diana is excluding Molly from her public life in order to protect her daughter or because she’s lacking in sympathy for the girl.  It’s critically important to the drama that we accept Diana’s feelings as complex and unravel them only gradually but Hershey telegraphs Diana’s lack of motherly love – and in such a cold, unnuanced way that she makes it difficult to believe even in the woman’s political passion.  The closing text on the screen dedicates the film to Ruth First (who was assassinated in 1982) and others who fought for reform in South Africa.  Given the construction of the script, Diana is hardly a convincing heroine if we don’t accept that she’s struggling to reconcile family and political loyalties:  Barbara Hershey makes this hard to accept.  She has some striking moments – as when the imprisoned Diana is offered the chance of seeing her children and looks to one side with tired, chilly dissatisfaction – but she also seems to keep hitting wrong notes.  You come to feel that it’s the actress rather than the character who’s failing to achieve emotional depth.

    The cast also includes Yvonne Bryceland as Molly’s grandmother.  The tense, plaintive score by Hans Zimmer serves the story well and it’s interesting to hear Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’, a familiar accompaniment to documentaries about Britain or America in the early 1960s, in this different part of the world.  (It’s also interesting to see the differing twist styles of blacks and whites.)   Barbara Hershey, Jodhi May and Linda Mvusi shared the Best Actress prize at the 1988 Cannes Festival, where Chris Menges also received the Special Grand Prize of the Festival Jury.

    [1990s]

  • A Passage to India

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1984)

    Adapting E M Forster’s novel for the screen would seem to present a considerable problem.  The book’s dramatic centre is a non-event or, at least, an unresolved event – something that corresponds to the unfathomableness of India for the British characters in the story.  David Lean hardly overcomes this problem:  Adela Quested’s allegation that Dr Aziz tried to rape her in the Marabar Caves is reduced to a matter for resolution in a court of law; and Lean’s predilection for marshalling crowds results in too great an emphasis on the political stir caused by Aziz’s arrest.  But A Passage to India is, for most of its one hundred and sixty minutes, a fine film.  The rhythm and clarity of the storytelling are, until the closing stages (the ‘Temple’ section of the novel), very satisfying.  In the effectively satirical description of colonial 1920s India, the cultural distortions imposed by British government are epitomised by a richly uniformed Indian brass band who swelter through ‘Tea for Two’ at a ‘bridge party’, an absurd social event organised by the British chief administrator.  (The natives are invited to the bridge party then ignored by their hosts.)  The sharply observed social comedy doesn’t, however, diminish the larger mystery of the setting, which Lean conveys through his use of the local landscape, colours and (especially) weather.  His penchant for cosmic imagery is a real strength:  the discrepancy between the representatives of a short-lived colonialism and the physical scale and spiritual age of the country containing these representatives is an integral part of the story.  (In Lean’s previous film, Ryan’s Daughter, it seemed the characters’ passions were meant to measure up to the gigantic geography of their surroundings; the fact that they didn’t made the movie ludicrous.)  Maurice Jarre’s score, too, though overly reminiscent of his Ryan’s Daughter theme, suggests very well the absurd collision of two different cultures and apprehensions of time.

    The elderly Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) and Dr Aziz (Victor Banerjee) first meet in a moonlit mosque and he thinks she’s a ghost:  it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the strength of the two actors’ contrasting emotional expressiveness in this scene gives it a spiritual power.  Adela Quested (Judy Davis), newly engaged to Mrs Moore’s son Ronny (Nigel Havers) and full of doubts about it, takes a bicycle ride alone and comes upon a disused temple surrounded by massive statuary of Indian figures in embrace.  She is fascinated, then flees, terrified by a horde of monkeys that descends screeching from the temple – the monkeys resemble malign, little, naked men.  This fusion of alien, carnal mystery and immediate physical threat vividly predicts the fear that we assume overwhelms Adela in the Marabar Caves (even though the sequence there, perhaps because you expect much from it, delivers less than the earlier show of panic).  The standard objection that Judy Davis is too attractive to play Adela seems hardly valid:  she’s made up in such a way that you can accept she would have been deemed unbeautiful by both the British and Indian communities of the time.  Davis may be too charming:  Adela’s desire ‘to see the real India’ comes across as the expression of a reasonably enlightened and modern sensibility rather than the raw, earnest lack of humour that characterises Forster’s Miss Quested.    Davis is also vocally rather muted – perhaps a slight unease with the English accent causes her to blur a few lines.   But her great alertness and sensitivity as an actress help to reveal Adela’s neurotic depths sympathetically and surprisingly:  the young woman she creates is far from a foolish virgin.  (It’s refreshing to find a surprising characterisation in a David Lean film.)  Judy Davis gives a terrific tension to the courtroom climax – a tension it needs.  As Aziz, Victor Banerjee occasionally fails, perhaps through over-eagerness, to make the most of his comic opportunities but he is beautifully persuasive in emotional extremity.

    Professor Godbole calls Mrs Moore ‘an old soul’ – that is, she’s had many incarnations.  Peggy Ashcroft’s artistry illuminates the phrase in both this Eastern sense and the more colloquial Western one.  Mrs Moore may be nearer to God than the other British characters but she’s also nearer to death; she’s both receptive to, and intimidated by, the experience of India.  Ashcroft’s radiance as a performer allows you to believe in Mrs Moore as a figure of spiritual authority.  Her plain-speaking, time-bound fearfulness and simple physical tiredness make her a real, vulnerable human being.  James Fox embodies the fair-mindedness of the schoolmaster Fielding easily and straightforwardly.  Fox isn’t a powerful actor but he’s likeable here, even when he’s wooden:  you root for this Englishman abroad with his decent, rather ineffectual determination to see justice done.  It’s a relief that the British actors playing colonial grotesques mostly do so with tact, especially Richard Wilson as the chief administrator.  Among the Indians, Saeed Jaffrey is outstanding as the Hamidullah, Aziz’s rather two-faced mentor.  There’s one major disappointment in the acting – and from the least expected quarter.  As the Hindu professor Godbole, Alec Guinness fails to suggest a mind that has cultivated transcendence of Western time and rationality.  He makes Godbole goodness-gracious-me comical.   (Guinness is the only white actor playing an Indian so his contribution seems doubly anomalous.)  The cast also includes Michael Culver (working hard to sustain a Scottish accent), Antonia Pemberton, Clive Swift, Ann Firbank, Art Malik, Roshan Seth and Sandra Hotz.

    Photographed by Ernest Day; production design by John Box.  The adaptation is by David Lean, who also – and fittingly for this, his last film – edited.   (The credits perhaps reflect his order of priorities:  the screenplay is a separate credit, subsidiary to ‘Directed and edited by David Lean’.)

    [1990s]

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