Picturenose

Too black and white
Bille August (Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1997), Les Miserables (1998)) heads up this multi-European country co-production, but his take on the tale of the relationship between a white South African prison guard and Nelson Mandela is flawed from the outset.

Approaching the immensely marketable material (James Gregory’s autobiography, detailing how his life became entwined with apartheid’s enemy-number-one Nelson Mandela because of his fluency in Xhosa, Mandela’s mother tongue) purely from a predictable, ‘How long will transformation take?’ perspective, badly vitiates the story’s suspense, rendering what could so easily have been a nuanced, subtle exploration of two men’s psychologies trite and curiously bereft of passion.

Greg Latter’s adaptation seems to largely miss the point - Gregory’s autobiography (never confirmed by Mandela as accurate), tells of his largely friend-bereft childhood on an inland farm; a black boy, Bafana, from whom he learns Xhosa, is the only friend his age, but their childhood bond counts for nothing in adulthood, by which time Gregory (Joseph Fiennes) has become a prison guard and strict Apartheid adherent. But Latter and August seem to have avoided this obvious ’split-personality’ aspect of Gregory, opting instead for an external view rather than an intimate interior landscape.

Mandela (a sombre turn from Dennis Haysbert) and Gregory meet in 1968, when, together with his equally (in fact, as its turns out even more) racist wife Gloria (Diane Kruger) and their children, Gregory is transferred to Robben Island, the high security facility where political prisoners are held, including the nominal head of the then-illegal African National Congress or ANC: Nelson Mandela.

Because of his Xhosa fluency, Gregory’s main duty involves eavesdropping on Mandela and the other prisoners and censoring their letters - a ‘window on the soul’ of Apartheid’s prized captives.

Gregory willingly complies, spurred on by his wife (Kruger’s Lady Macbethesque take is perhaps the film’s most enjoyable aspect) who longs for a successful career for her husband to compensate for her own hairdressing business’s failure.

But August, however, does not offer the viewer a window into the soul of Mandela - rather, we are left with nothing more than an old-fashioned sob story in which the character arc is cringingly obvious from the outset.

Furthermore, director and screenwriter have clearly chosen their side, with the ANC, while referred to as terrorists, never being shown committing any acts of violence against whites, which is a glaring omission, since the fear that such acts brought to the whites is what kept apartheid active. Indeed, the only acts of violence shown are those committed by the ruling whites on the suppressed blacks, with the ANC inappropriately canonized.

Simply, Goodbye Bafana would have benefited from telling its story from the oppressor’s perspective; in opting for growing hero-worship from the point of view of a white male, it leaves the audience no more informed as to the rights and wrongs of a turbulent time than before the film began.

140 mins.