A Dry White Season

retssalsdrama af den klassiske slags.

An anti-apartheid movie whose heart is in the right place. Brandon and Zakes Mokae are both very good.

On the surface this is a Message Movie with a name cast, but on closer examination it looks more like an exploitation film. Of course I mean that in a good way :-)

"A Dry White Season" is a movie about the oppression of Blacks, made for a white audience. Asking me to feel emotion for a duped white man while the Blacks are being tortured and killed is unsettling, but the message is a good one.

This film is unblinking in its depiction of the most violent side of apartheid.

"A thumpingly didactic script, but Palcy has crafted a watchable - if not particularly important, given its competition - one."

For whatever reason, decent movies about apartheid are hard to come by. This is one of the better ones, but it still suffers from a mundane script and a narrative arc (not to mention climax) worthy of Syd Field.

Palcy sometimes allows things to become melodramatic, especially the film's main villain. Overall, however, she tells a powerful, upsetting story in a riveting, unforgettable way.

75.500

Occasionally powerful but melodramatic antiapartheid story. Sutherland has thankless role of naive white man who, appalled by what he sees, blindly struggles to help the oppressed, while Brando steals the show as a clever but resigned lawyer. Martinique-born Palcy gives us an honorable but oddly distanced film, as if she too were overwhelmed by her theme's emotionalism.

Even though this is another film that takes the spurious approach of viewing the oppression of blacks through the injustices heaped on a sympathetic white protagonist, it generally succeeds, largely because the screenplay allows for the secondary characters to be well-drawn, multifaceted individuals instead of noble cutouts. Palcy's directing is less successful. Many sequences play with the square rigidity of 1970's TV dramas. Brando's performance is a riveting exercise in grand understatement.