Catch a Fire (***1/4)

? This is story of a once-apolitical man named Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) who becomes a terrorist in the eyes of his government, the apartheid regime of 1980s South Africa. Tim Robbins plays the head of an anti-terrorist unit that goes after Chamusso. Screenwriter Shawn Slovo’s parents were actually anti-apartheid activists.

+  This isn’t one of those Hollywood movies about foreign people that’s really about the American, or about black people that’s really about the white guy. In fact, all of the people in the movie are Africans, and the main character is the black guy. Still, in some ways the man that Tim Robbins brilliantly portrays is the more interesting one. Patrick’s motivations are pretty clear, but what of the guy who can knowingly countenance what some might call “harsh interrogation techniques” but invite his victim for Sunday dinner, who thinks that the system he is fighting for is bound to fail but seems sincere in his desire to protect it. He’s an immoral person, but not a person with no morals. As for Patrick, about half way through I realized that his story was a little bit imperfect somehow, and that therefore it must be a true story. This was a good thing. At the very end, the real Patrick Chamusso appears to movingly complete the tale.

- The story starts just a little bit slowly (but becomes absorbing). I might have hoped the story would tell a bit broader tale about the struggle against the racist government, but it’s a smaller movie than that. The beginning of the movie, though, does show the ways that different people resist and accommodate repressive governments, and the everyday indignities that apartheid imposed on black South Africans.

= ***1/4 An intriguing quasi-thriller than happens to be fact-based and with an exotic setting.

IMDb link