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]