The Empire Strikes Out

By RICHARD CORLISS

When the sun sets on an empire, who will turn on the lamplights? Or will the fading sky be illuminated by the torches of revolution and anarchy? In South Africa, white rulers desperately hold back the dusk with brutal measures that amount to the imposition of triple daylight saving time. But they can't hold back the clock; night and a new, black dawn are surely imminent. In Britain the empire has collapsed upon itself. A long generation ago the colonists came home, followed by their colonials -- dark skins, quick minds and rebellious hearts from the East and West Indies and beyond. Now England's urban centers are postimperial melting pots. The streets simmer with new neighbors and old rancors, and people are getting burned.

Two ambitious new films, both telling tales of the end of empire, are as different as their titles: Cry Freedom and Sammy & Rosie Get Laid. The first is Director Richard Attenborough's stately, schizophrenic epic of South Africa a decade ago as blacks groped toward liberation. Sammy & Rosie is Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's double vision of London as the hip place to be and the last place on postimperial earth. For 2 hr. 35 min., Cry Freedom meanders through a meadow of noble sentiments, finding its only drama in the education of a white liberal South African and his escape from that apartheid prison camp. In an hour less, Sammy & Rosie blasts a bomber crew of blacks, Pakistanis, Americans and leftist Brits through a pocked landscape of racial and sexual conflagrations. As a Pakistani gent postcards to the folks back home, "Streets on fire -- wish you were here."

By rights, Cry Freedom ought to be Bantu Stephen Biko's story. The man was as close to being an authentic martyr as any revolution can claim: charismatic preacher of nonviolent resistance, champion of racial equality, steely victim of state sadism. He died in the arms of his torturers ten years ago. There is surely a film here, but Attenborough and Screenwriter John Briley can't find it. The men who made Gandhi turn their Steve Biko (Denzel Washington, from TV's St. Elsewhere) into a saintly apparition; he is first seen swathed in blinding sunlight and last seen shimmering in the memory of his friend Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), a white newspaper editor. Biko is a passive hero, valued not for what he achieves but for what he endures. He is a placard masquerading as a character. For all the strength and dignity that Washington invests in Biko, this saint really is elsewhere.

Once Biko dies, barely an hour into the film, Woods carries the narration; he plots his escape to any land that will publish his Biko biography. The police threaten his cute family with errant gunfire and toxic T shirts, and the viewer is meant to recoil from these domestic atrocities. Of course they are horrid, yet their intended impact reinforces, in dramatic terms, the Afrikaners' credo: white lives mean more. Piling on bogus suspense devices as Woods snakes his way toward freedom, Attenborough lets the venality of South African imperialism degenerate into a staid chase film: The Brady Bunch Flees Apartheid. Once again Attenborough has proved that the road to dull is paved with good intentions.

Sammy & Rosie is never dull. Indeed, it shrinks from the ordinary as it does from decorum, balance or coherence. Kureishi and Director Stephen Frears, who two years ago collaborated on the low-budget My Beautiful Laundrette, have - no time for the dramatic verities. They're breathless with all the hot news inside them. In his diary that accompanies the film's published screenplay, Kureishi describes Sammy & Rosie as his usual "mixture of realism and surrealism, seriousness and comedy, art and gratuitous sex . . . All the bits and pieces will just have to get along with each other, like people at a party." But that is too modest for the sprawling expanse of this film. Laundrette was a fractious house party; Sammy & Rosie is a Black Mass block party, and everyone is invited to attend at his own risk.

The guests of honor are three odd couples: Sammy (Ayub Khan Din), a Pakistani-born accountant, and his American photographer client Anna (Wendy Gazelle); Rosie (Frances Barber), Sammy's wife, a "downwardly mobile" English social worker, and her beau of the evening Danny (Roland Gift), a young black; and Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), Sammy's father, and his old flame Alice (Claire Bloom), a romantic Englishwoman. Is that all clear? No? Don't worry; these lives are not meant to be sorted out. Like real relationships, they are messy, incendiary, lingering past the pleasure point. Kureishi's women can be doctrinaire or maternal or game for a good time; his men, the "unfair sex," can be docile or brutal or just led by their lust. Poor randy Sammy, slave to the priapic imperative: "I'm like a little man being pulled around by a dog."

The big bad dog here is Rafi, who has come to London to escape his old crimes as a despot in the Pakistani government. If Cry Freedom finds easy outrage nestling with the victims of state torture, Sammy & Rosie is prepared at least to make the deathbed that a genial torturer can lie in. But Rafi gets no more or less sympathy than any other character in this exuberant egalitarian stew of a movie. Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive is up for grabs. And what do we find in an empire's night ashes? Punks and ghosts and madmen dancing in the carnage or singing a Motown melody as all the survivors copulate on Armageddon Eve. In Sammy & Rosie's cultural revolution, the radicals strike not poses but sexual sparks. They give a lovely light.