The Bland Face of State Terror

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A DRY WHITE SEASON Directed by Euzhan Palcy

Screenplay by Colin Welland and Euzhan Palcy

Here it is, then, our annual antiapartheid movie. In moral thrust, A Dry White Season is exactly like its immediate predecessors, Cry Freedom and A World Apart. Once again a white liberal comes to radical consciousness after intimate confrontations with the murderous brutality of South African racism and suffers dreadfully as a result.

Artistically, A Dry White Season may aspire to less than the previous movies, since it lacks both the epic ambition of Richard Attenborough's Freedom and the psychological delicacy of Chris Menges' World. Emotionally, however, it has a force unmatched by the other movies on this subject. For the new film does not stir you to thought (if you still need to think over apartheid, you are probably brain damaged) or sympathy (if you still lack compassion for South Africa's blacks, you probably need a heart implant). It stirs you to outrage.

One reason for the picture's impact is its straight-ahead melodramatic structure. At its simplest level the movie functions as a well-constructed mystery story. A black man, a gardener named Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), comes to his employer, Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), asking him to help find his son. The boy was taken into police custody during the Soweto protests of 1976 and has disappeared. Du Toit, a calm and rational man, believes this is surely just a bureaucratic muddle that can be easily ameliorated by a solid citizen's firm but polite intervention.

But we are not talking bureaucracy here. We are talking about a strangely imperturbable menace. Searching for his son, Ngubene is also arrested; father and boy are tortured and then murdered in prison. And because Du Toit continues to seek justice on their behalf, he is himself victimized by state terror that is the more frightening because of the bland face with which it covers its institutionalized psychopathy. Du Toit is subjected to steadily escalating harassment. Eventually he loses his job and his wife (Janet Suzman in a good, dour performance), and he must deal with the fact that his daughter is willing to betray him to the police.

He is not entirely isolated in his struggle. His young son stands by him. So do a scrappy journalist (Susan Sarandon in an underdeveloped role) and a weary, canny lawyer, played by Marlon Brando. In his first movie role in eight years, Brando is shockingly bloated in appearance, but his full authority as an actor is mobilized by a part in which he obviously believes (he was paid union scale).

But it may be that the best thing about A Dry White Season is that it does not practice unconscious apartheid. Our attention may be focused on the political education of Ben du Toit, but the Ngubene family is well particularized and their torments set forth unblinkingly, not to say horrifically. And Ben is provided with a guide to the realities of life on the other side of the color line: the tough, suspicious, ultimately compassionate taxi driver named Stanley (Zakes Mokae). He is a man who turns up in surprising places in unpredictable moods. He provides the bestartlements that shake Du Toit, who is appropriately all stunned introspection.

If Du Toit is the white audience's surrogate, Stanley must be director Euzhan Palcy's surrogate. Imparting energy and waywardness to her film, he helps give it the pulse of popular fiction without in any way diminishing its moral seriousness.