10 SEPTEMBER 1988, Page 43

Cinema

A World Apart (PG', Curzon West End)

Through child's eyes

Hilary Mantel

Little girls on their way home from dancing class don't take any notice of what the newsstands proclaim: '90 Day Act becomes law.' But en route to her comfort- able surburban home, Molly (Johdi May) sees from the back seat of her friend's car a black man on a bicycle mown down by a white motorist who does not stop. She concerns herself with the particular tragedy; her mother, with the general.

It is Johannesburg, 1963: three years after Sharpeville. Diana (Barbara Her- shey) is a radical journalist and a supporter of the ANC. She is a brisk, nervy woman, with her clipped speech, tailored suits and apparently smudge-proof lipstick. Her wider motivation — what makes her throw in her lot with the victims of the social order — is not explored, and is not within the ambit of the film. But we see the effects of her beliefs: briefcases and handbills are her props, the frantic tip-tapping of type- writer keys is the background music of her domestic life. Thirteen-year-old Molly and her two younger sisters exist on the fringes of their mother's attention. Snatched mo- ments of kindliness and feminine intimacy leave them, afterwards, more bereft.

As a simple polemic against the working mother, the film succeeds admirably; but Diana's work is dangerous. Simple caution demands Molly's exclusion from her mother's life. Her father has gone away; otherwise he might have been arrested with Mandela, imprisoned for life. Molly, who is a biddable, polite, sensitive child, learns what she needs to know by listening at doors. Adults plan and argue, not in front of her, but within earshot, at the periphery of her vision.

A World Apart is based on the true story of Ruth First, the ANC activist who was killed by a letter bomb in 1982; her husband Joe Slovo is now the only white member of the ANC's executive. Their daughter Shawn, who was 13 when her mother was arrested and detained under the '90 Day Act', has written the screen- play. It might have been an empty and unpleasant piece of political posturing; in fact it is a singular and moving personal testimony. At Cannes this year it won the Special Jury Prize, and Hershey, Johdi May and Linda Mvusi, who plays the family's maid, shared honours as Best Actress. The director is Chris Menges, the cinematographer of The Mission and The Killing Fields; his style here is oblique and delicate, and marked by disdain for the obvious. There are no directorial drum- rolls to signal the key scenes; they create their impact by themselves. Above all, both writer and director know when a point has been made. They make it, and move on. How very rare that is; it's pleasant to go to the cinema and not be patronised.

When Diana is arrested, Molly suffers horribly; she is a child, with a child's inability to foresee and predict, dragged into an adult world. Probably there would be no martyrs, if martyrs thought about their families; Molly is victimised by her contemporaries, and manhandled by her best friend's father — an Afrikaner who seems to believe that communism is as infectious as measles. And yet the best friend's family is close, loving, a refuge (Molly thinks) in her distress; it offers all the comforts — until they are withdrawn that her own life does not provide.

Diana faces interrogation, and a cat-and- mouse re-arrest. Her chief tormentor is a complacent butterball; behind him, leaner men skulk, vigilant and vulpine. From time to time their impatience bursts forth: 'We should take her downstairs.' Butterball reiterates: 'In this country we have respect for women.' Respect for women means that a woman will not be tortured: at least, not at first.

Diana attempts suicide, and is released into the comparative mercies of house arrest; but when her daughter finds her suicide note, she sees it as the final abandonment, the final betrayal. A black friend of the family has fared less well: he has died in detention. His funeral provides an emotional finale: shades of Cry Free- dom, though we are spared those over- simplifications. 'Pick up the spear where it has fallen,' the priest exhorts the singing, swaying crowds.

You have to hang on to what you know: that the spear has been picked up by those who think it is politic to plant bombs in cheap multi-racial cafés during the lunch hour. It is difficult to resist the film's emotional appeal. And yet you do not feel your emotions are being manipulated, because it is an honest and intelligent piece of work, and its thrust is humane, not doctrinaire: a life is a life on either side, and a broken heart is a broken heart.