by Rebecca L. Ford
October 20, 2006
In 1981 a Black South African named Patrick Chamusso worked in the Secunda oil refinery north of Johannesburg. Compared to other South African Blacks, Patrick was affluent.
He had a good life. He was a foreman. He had a car.
He coached boys' soccer. He had a company house. He had a beautiful wife, Precious, who liked nice things.
She was a former beauty queen-Miss Highveld Africa 1972. He called white men "boss." He forbade Radio Freedom in his house.
He didn't make waves. He laid low. And then he caught afire.
The film Catch A Fire, starring Derek Luke as Patrick and Tim Robbins as Nic Vos, a high ranking interrogator for the police under the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, chronicles the transformation of Patrick Chamusso from factory foreman to freedom fighter. Based on Chamusso's actual life story, this powerful movie provides a sense of how Blacks under the cruelest of regimes found some relief in family, community and music. It captures the humanity of both the fearful oppressors as well as the terrorized oppressed.
And it unflinchingly demonstrates the arbitrariness of apartheid, out of which government- sanctioned death and devastation could strike unpredictably, like a lightening bolt.
During apartheid, members of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress operated out of the neighboring country of Mozambique, where Patrick's father's family lived. It wasn't unusual for Patrick to travel across the boarder for family or fun, never politics.
But then, things start to happen when Patrick is away: Railroad tracks are sabotaged while he's at his cousin's wedding. There is an explosion at the Secunda refinery while the soccer team he coaches is playing for the championship. Worse yet, when questioned by police, his alibis fall apart.
Patrick, we discover, has a secret.
Taken by South African police to the infamous Vlakplaas interrogation facility, he is beaten and tortured. He takes his licks.
He keeps his secret.
But when he finds out that Precious is also being tortured, Patrick explodes. "What kind of man are you?
" he demands of Vos. "Who does this to a woman?"
To save her he confesses.
Vos knows, however, that he is innocent and orders him released. But he's not the same Patrick. He can't return to his old life.
He goes into exile and joins Special Ops, the military wing of the ANC.
Special Ops takes great pride in performing acts of sabotage without loss of human life. Its objective is to show the power of its opposition, not to kill innocents.
"In the anti-apartheid movement, sabotage was symbolic," explains the film's director Phillip Noyce.
After Patrick arrives, Special Ops plans another bombing at Secunda. Patrick, who knows everything about the plant, its catwalks and underground passageways, volunteers for the mission.
"If you had planned better," he tells his comrades, "you could have blown up the whole plant."
They give him the code name "Hot Stuff," and he heads back to South Africa to perform his mission.
Derek Luke delivers a masterfully calibrated performance in which his character escalates from contented family man to reluctant warrior.
Luke, who has played boys until now in such films as Antwone Fischer, Biker Boyz and Glory Road, is called upon to be a man in Catch A Fire. He rises to the occasion.
Tim Robbins says he had to put his views aside to discover the justification of Vos, a composite character.
In making the movie, former interrogators were used as technical advisors to Robbins, and Blacks with experience parallel to Patrick's were used as technical advisors to Derek Luke. As the only Americans in the cast, says Luke, he and Robbins, who spent their days surrounded by oppressors and the oppressed, found themselves needing to talk to each other to vent.
Director Phillip Noyce, veteran of big action features such as Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger as well as smaller political films like The Quiet American and Rabbit Proof Fence, says he sought to overturn Hollywood conventions by communicating themes of forgiveness rather than retribution.
But Noyce is a showman at heart, and there is plenty of good old-fashioned Hollywood action, suspense and romantic sacrifice in this movie to satisfy everyone.
Yet to fully appreciate Catch A Fire, it is important to consider the movie in the context of the concept of forgiveness, which has played a central role in the post-apartheid political and psychological recovery of South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by former archbishop Desmond Tutu, began hearings in 1996 to acknowledge, document and heal the deep wounds of apartheid.
"There is a lot of freedom that comes from the process of forgiveness," says Bonnie Henna, the 27-year-old actress who was raised in the South African township of Soweto and plays Precious in the movie. "Only now are South Africans realizing what a miracle took place.
News RSS