MOVIE REVIEW : South African Film Attacks Apartheid

“Mapantsula” (at the Royal) is a movie that connects violently with its subject: racial and social injustice in South Africa. But, like its black anti-hero, the mapantsula (Zulu for small-time crook ) of the title, the movie makers do their job with swiftness, guile and gall. It’s a moral drama in disguise. Set in Soweto, the film starts as a racy gangster melodrama with an unusually pungent low-life city background, then builds inexorably to a moral reckoning, a ferocious, unforgettable denouement.

Thomas Mogotlane--who co-wrote the scenario with first-time director Oliver Schmitz--plays street thief Panic with rare brilliance and objectivity; he has all the twitchy nerve-ends of a rat on the run. His Panic is incorrigible even by anti-hero standards--an ex-bus driver who slipped into violent crime and now lives off his girlfriend (Thembi Mitshali), dodges his landlady (Dolly Rathebe) and, working with a partner, cheekily picks the pockets of affluent whites. If they spot him, he pulls his knife, insolently counts his pickings and glares them down.

There is nothing prettied up about the Soweto streets, a dirty, bustling place full of the thrum of traffic, cries and the insistent beat of Township Jive, the area’s generic music. And there is nothing artificially endearing about Panic. Liar, layabout, thief and jailhouse snitch, he lacks even the virtue of honor among thieves.

If the audience likes him at all, it’s because of his ebullience, his lively swagger, his silly sense of style, his taste for wide-brimmed hats, or the way--while dancing in clubs--that he slips his pants down over his buttocks, wiggles and grins. Panic is a sociopathic charmer who gets away with a lot because of his quick smile, quicker knife and the outrageous things that he does with absolute self-confidence, like slipping into stolen clothes on a bus in plain view of the passengers. Within a dangerous, repressive society--with rigid racial divisions and brutal police--Panic seems, on some crazy level, to be free. That’s only one of the illusions the movie strips away.

“Mapantsula” has a near- film noir structure, a tricky double-narrative line trapping the characters. Panic’s hooliganism is all in flashback; in present time, he is grilled in jail by a half-cajoling, half-bullying interrogator, Stander (Marcel Van Heerden), who, playing both good cop and bad, tries to make him turn informant again on the radicals who share his cell.

The Soweto sections are shot in a breezy, tear-away style that seems high on the golds and rust browns of the street, the deep crushed scarlet of a dance hall, the sunny, dusty greens of the all-white suburbs. In the prison, the camera gets low-down, the color goes blue-gray and ugly, and Schmitz’s pacing gets as methodical and relentless as Stander’s. Outside, running wild on the streets, Panic is slave to both his appetites and the system around him. Inside--subject to abuse, torture, ostracism and the threat of death--he may, paradoxically, be freer.

The movie suggests something socially conscious pictures often sidestep: that the victims of repression can lead vibrant lives despite it. And it brings out something else that American thrillers mostly avoid, the way good and bad can be promiscuously mixed up in one character. Remorselessly, with only an occasional misstep--like the soggily over-idealized union activist (Peter Sephuma), with his instant flow of revolutionary rhetoric--”Mapantsula” burns down to a double-explosion of that double story-line.

This devastating attack on apartheid--initially snuck through the South African censors disguised as a conventional tsotsi or gangster thriller--was made by a racially mixed team. Mogotlane is black; Schmitz is white. The acting throughout--by the believably cruel Van Heerden, the earthy Mitshali and Rathebe--has rich spontaneity. The filming has gutty opportunism and drive.

But it’s Mogotlane who digs down into some real pain and truth. Whether nervously toying with smoke and drink in a dance hall, or staring at the man who may kill him, his Panic is one of the great performances of the year. As he gradually moves toward revelation, the movie opens right up into grief and fear, generating a relentless attack on the system that it shows robbing people of dignity, blighting lives, hiding itself behind excuses of propriety or civilization. Like Panic itself, “Mapantsula” (Times-rated Mature for sex, language and violence) slips up under the audience’s defenses. Our conscience and sense of outrage are ripped open before we even feel the knife.

‘MAPANTSULA’

A Haverbeam/David Hannay presentation of a Max Montocchio production. Producer Max Montocchio. Director Oliver Schmitz. Script Thomas Mogotlane, Schmitz. Camera Rod Stewart. Art direction Robyn Hoymeyr. Editor Mark Baard. Music by the Ouens. Executive producers David Hannay, Keith Rosenbaum. With Mogotlane, Marcel Van Heerden, Thembi Mitshali, Dolly Rathebe, Peter Sephuma, Darlington Michaels.

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.