MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WEEPING’ INDICTS APARTHEID

“Place of Weeping” (Beverly Center Cineplex) has such painful urgency and timeliness that it overcomes its moments of awkwardness and preachiness. Well paced and often compelling, it’s one of those films whose rough-hewn quality seems appropriate to the raw immediacy of its story.

James Whyle stars as a Johannesburg journalist who goes to a small farming community to cover the fighting between black factions, which threatens the deceptive tranquility of the area. He stumbles upon the killing of a hungry black farm laborer by his master, a burly, brutal Afrikaner (Charles Comyn, a splendid heavy). The farmer instills such fear in his workers, including the laborer’s widow, that he is confident he can get away with murder.

There is one black woman (Gcina Mhlophe) on the farm, however, who has suffered her own tragic losses at this farmer’s hands, and against awesome odds, she struggles to bring the farmer to justice. Despairing of organizing her own terrified people, who are virtual slaves, she reluctantly joins forces with Whyle.

Writer-director Darrell Roodt, a young Johannesburg native, has both a solid sense of structure and a fine sense of the visual, contrasting the natural beauty of the Transvaal region with the hellishness of life for blacks under apartheid. He is not yet skilled with actors: The less experienced seem amateurish under his direction, while most of the pros are overly theatrical. Some of his dialogue is unnecessarily, if forgivably, didactic, especially since his depiction of life for blacks is so stark that he scarcely needs to write speeches against it.

On the whole, Roodt is much stronger in plot development than in characterization. Where he is most effective and illuminating is in making clear the reason why so many blacks fight one another: Apartheid hasn’t left them enough land of their own to sustain them. Also, we realize that this farmer is so thoroughly a racist that he truly feels no guilt in killing a black man for stealing a chicken.

Roodt, his producer Anant Singh and everyone involved are to be applauded for committing themselves to such a courageous, utterly uncompromising and finally effective enterprise that must have been dangerous and difficult to make. Seeing “Place of Weeping” (rated PG for graphic violence), with its depiction of a nation perched on a powder keg, must be something like having read the also flawed but potent “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” when it was first published in 1851.

‘PLACE OF WEEPING’ A New World Pictures release. Producer Anant Singh. Director Darrell Roodt. Screenplay Roodt; from a story by Roodt and Les Volpe. Camera Paul Witte. Associate producer Volpe. Art director Dave Barkham. Film editor David Heitner. With James Whyle, Gcina Mhlophe, Charles Comyn, Norman Coombes, Michelle Du Toit, Ramolao Makhene, Patrick Shai, Siphiwe Khumalo, Kernels Coertzen, Doreen Mazibuko, Thoko Ntshinga, Jeremy Taylor, Nicole Jourdan.

Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).