Catch a Fire

Originally known as 'Hotstuff' but changed to avoid unwarranted blaxploitation/disco era connotations, Catch A Fire is further proof that Africa has become fashionable continent for Western liberal filmmakers. Not that you could accuse screenwriter Shawn Slovo of following a trend. Born and bred in South Africa, where her father Joe was leader of the Communist Party and a prominent ANC activist, she wrote A World Apart back in 1988, while Nelson Mandela was still in prison on Robben Island.

Most mainstream movies about South Africa's apartheidt regime have filtered the drama through a white identification figure; think Juliette Binoche in In My Country, Kevin Kline in Cry Freedom, or Barbara Hershey in A World Apart. (Futher north the same applies, witness Blood Diamond and The Constant Gardner.)

But maybe things are changing. The white protagonist here is really the antagonist; Security Branch officer Nick Vos (Tim Robbins). To be sure, he's a family man and a Christian doing what he believes is right. But in the course of the movie he arrests an innocent man, Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), beats and tortures him and his wife Precious (Bonnie Henna) and orchestrates the murder of several ANC terrorists - whose ranks Patrick eventually joins. South Africans may have reconciled with their immediate past, but we're not likely to identify with Vos on an emotional level.

Chamusso, on the other hand, is a diligent hard-working man, a foreman at an oil refinery and the coach of kids soccer team. He does his best to play the cards dealt him - but whose extra-marital affair lands him in trouble when the authorities require an alibi for a bombing at the factory. Vos doesn't believe his account, and by the time Patrick comes clean, it's too late.

Although it's hardly a revelation that apartheid was an unjust and oppressive system, the movie finds draws some urgency from current events as an account of the making of a terrorist. Again, it shouldn't come as news that false arrest and torture would tend to radicalize the prisoner, but given that this seems to be official US foreign policy at the moment it's certainly a message worth repeating.

Australian-born director Phillip Noyce lost his way in Hollywood with hack-work like Sliver and Patriot Games, then revived his career with the politically-engaged dramas Rabbit Proof Fence and The Quiet American. He gives Catch a Fire the clip of a good thriller, but also some of the glib morality.

Strangely, perhaps, the film is more convincing with the African characters than the Afrikaans. Tim Robbins - generally a frigid, remote actor - barely bothers to attempt an accent, and struggles to suggest much of an inner-life for Vos. Derek Luke (from Antwone Fisher) is so much more engaging as Chamusso that it can hardly help but feel like a one-sided melodrama. Documentary footage of the real Chamusso that plays as a postscript to the movie is actually more moving than anything that's preceded it.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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