The quiet African

Reviewed - The Quiet African:SOME factually based movies prove to be stranger than fiction. Phillip Noyce's South African drama, Catch a Fire, contains so many unlikely narrative devices that it comes as a surprise towards the end to discover that it's based on the experiences of a former African National Congress (ANC) activist, Patrick Chamusso, who appears as himself just before the closing credits.

Impressively played in the film by Derek Luke, Chamusso is introduced as a hard-working Mozambique immigrant promoted to foreman at a Transvaal oil refinery. An apolitical man intent on providing a good life for his wife and children, he takes the racist humiliations of life in early 1980s South Africa in his stride - until he and his wife are interrogated and beaten when he is suspected of bombing the refinery. His alibi is based on a double coincidence that heightens suspicion.

In the movie's most implausible scene, the under- developed character of an anti-terrorism squad officer (Tim Robbins, oddly playing good cop and bad cop simultaneously) brings Chamusso to his home for Sunday lunch with his family.

Catch a Fire is quite interesting as it charts how oppression gradually transformed a man from pacifist to terrorist, but it lacks the dramatic urgency Noyce brought to his most recent movies, Rabbit Proof Fence and The Quiet American.

The screenplay is the work of Shawn Slovo, who wrote the far more potent 1988 apartheid drama, A World Apart, based on her childhood experiences when her activist mother, Ruth First, was imprisoned in the 1960s. The new film is dedicated to her late father, Joe Slovo, the white leader of the ANC military wing, and he figures briefly as a character in the movie.