what a great movie

I saw Goodbye Bafana in a special screening in Brussels last night. Bille August and Joseph Fiennes were also present.


Goodbye Bafana was a very good movie. Extremely well acted, I loved Joe (James Gregory) and Dennis Haysbert (Nelson Mandela) in their roles, and Diane Kruger (Gloria Gregory) did well, too. The movie has the slow, a bit mysterious charm in it, as August's movies usually do. The color scheme was like African dust, diluted, sometimes almost raw in the scorching sun.

The movie starts when a young prison warden James Gregory arrives to Robben Island 1968 and is addressed to keep an eye on Nelson Mandela, who is being imprisoned there for his political views. Gregory gets this mission, because he speaks xhosa, the local language, and therefore is able to read (and censor) the correspondence in and out of the prison, as well as understand what the prisoners talk to each other.

James Gregory is a faithful supporter of apartheid. He believes these black men are behind bars for a good reason and he supports the government politics. Gregory is shaken by a raid in a busy street, where police rough up black people in random, demanding them of passports and if they failed to show them, the police beat and arrested them. This is the first glimpse to the injustice of the policy, but what rattled Gregory's cage the most, was that his own children were there to see the police brutality and they were unable to understand why those people were beaten so badly. Gregory's explanations sounded shallow even in his own ears... and very slowly, over the years, he became to see through the apartheid and change his views.

Dennis Haysbert was chosen to the role of Mandela, because of his quiet, distinctive charm and mental power. He did a great job. Joe was chosen because Bille August wanted an actor, who was tough and yet sensitive, someone who would be able to portray the change in the character in a period of almost thirty years. It was a very challenging role but Joe did a marvellous job.

There has been a lot of talk about his South African accent, and mostly it has been praised. I followed it very closely, and I think Joe did fine in that area, too. In some scenes the British accent is more or less audible, but most of the time he does a wonderful job.

Diane Kruger did a good job as James's wife, a mother of two, who was also raising their kids to support the apartheid. She opposed her husband being a warden for Nelson Mandela, because she could see that the close contact with the inmate made cracks to James's shield and his racistic opinions were vanishing rapidly. She tried to hold onto the apartheid views for much longer than her husband. Kruger was not very convincing in the ending, where her character also changes her views and sees the light. It somehow happened all too sudden and felt a bit rushed - that should have been introduced a bit earlier to be more believable.

The movie ends to a year 1990, when Nelson Mandela is released from prison after being incarcerated for 27 years. The era of the new South Africa was to begin.

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