Books, Arts & Manners: Molly Uncoddled

WHITE South Africa has morally and politically painted itself into a corner. There is no way a minority, in this day and age, can keep its country’s majority as second or third-class citizens and permanently get away with it. On the other hand, I appreciate the problem of giving up what you consider your rightful, hard-earned possession, and the near-impossibility of squeezing the Dutch South Africans back into the tiny fatherland. There might, of course, be some compromise solution, except that after all the sternness and brutalities of the Afrikaners, there is probably no way of working out a peaceable settlement, so all that seems left is to keep the screws tight or to tighten them further. Meanwhile apartheid is a nightmare from which the only awakening I can imagine is into another, reverse nightmare.

Until recently, the screen, unlike the theater, has hardly addressed this problem at all. Now film treatments are beginning to spring up, most conspicuously Richard Attenborough’s grandiosely inept Cry Freedom. Chris Menges’s A World Apart is a markedly better film, although, as praise goes, that is not the least faint. Still, by not attacking the problem head-on, but approaching it obliquely through the miseries of 13-year-old Molly—whose parents’ political activism leaves her ever more lonely and deprived of affection—then gradually fanning out to encompass the full horror of apartheid, the film manages to avoid the sense of agitprop oversimplification.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

WHITE South Africa has morally and politically painted itself into a corner. There is no way a minority, in this day and age, can keep its country’s majority as second or third-class citizens and permanently get away with it. On the other hand, I appreciate the problem of giving up what you consider your rightful, hard-earned possession, and the near-impossibility of squeezing the Dutch South Africans back into the tiny fatherland. There might, of course, be some compromise solution, except that after all the sternness and brutalities of the Afrikaners, there is probably no way of working out a peaceable settlement, so all that seems left is to keep the screws tight or to tighten them further. Meanwhile apartheid is a nightmare from which the only awakening I can imagine is into another, reverse nightmare.

Until recently, the screen, unlike the theater, has hardly addressed this problem at all. Now film treatments are beginning to spring up, most conspicuously Richard Attenborough’s grandiosely inept Cry Freedom. Chris Menges’s A World Apart is a markedly better film, although, as praise goes, that is not the least faint. Still, by not attacking the problem head-on, but approaching it obliquely through the miseries of 13-year-old Molly—whose parents’ political activism leaves her ever more lonely and deprived of affection—then gradually fanning out to encompass the full horror of apartheid, the film manages to avoid the sense of agitprop oversimplification.