Catch a Fire (2006)

One has to wonder just how relevant Catch a Fire, an account of how Patrick Chamusso – an apolitical Black factory worker – joined the ANC in 1980 after being tortured by Apartheid security police would be to most South Africans today. After all, about half the people alive in this country today weren't even born back then . . .

Review by : James O'Ehley

Catch a Fire is an almost nostalgic look at
the anti-Apartheid Struggle . . .

Don't get me wrong: Patrick Chamusso's eventful life story should be retold, but not as cursorily as it is done in this film.

In 1980 Patrick was a Black foreman at the Sasol petrol refinery in Secunda when an MK operative blew up some fuel tanks. Chamusso was a “keep your head down” and take care of your family type of guy who avoided politics and had nothing to do with the bombing.

However, that didn't prevent him from being arrested and tortured by the brutal and paranoid security police (Tim Robbins wearing a pained, almost constipated expression plays his chief interrogator). Chamusso's apolitical stance finally ended when the security police also tortured his wife to get at him and he then slipped across the border to Mozambique to join MK, the ANC's military wing. Later he would return to finish the job at the Secunda refinery.

Was Patrick right in deserting his family? After all, it would mean that his two daughters (aged six and ten) would grow up without a father – he only saw them again eleven years later in 1991 when he was released from Robben Island. Catch a Fire never really gets around to asking this question – it is in too much of a rush to recount events.

The biggest problem with Catch a Fire is that it simply seems to be going through the motions. While it is difficult not to be emotionally affected by the scenes of police torture half-way through the film, Catch a Fire somehow never does the material at hand justice.

The movie also skimps on Patrick Chamusso's life in post-apartheid South Africa. He runs an orphanage, which provides shelter for about 80 orphans, from his home today. This is practically material for another movie in itself, but Catch a Fire simply fast forwards over all this.

In that sense Catch a Fire feels very much like a film about South Africa that was made by people who doesn't live there (director Phillip Noyce is Australian and screenplay writer Shawn Slovo resides in London). The West's media interest in this country pretty much peaked during the apartheid years and waned after the 1994 elections. The West have been paying scant interest to us since then and this movie reflects that same disinterest to a large degree . . .

South Africa today faces many new challenges and problems: AIDS, crime, poverty and unequal distribution of wealth are but a few, something which the locally-made Tsotsi realised when it updated its apartheid-era Athol Fugard story to the present.

Catch a Fire instead seems to be interested in little else than being a hagiography of the ANC in what is an almost nostalgic look at the so-called “Struggle Years”.

Part of the problem is Slovo's script, which takes a skewed one-sided look at the era. Not only does it ignore many of that time's ambiguities – innocent bystanders were often hurt and killed in MK's bombing campaign and a paranoid ANC command tortured their own operatives at the Quattro camp in Angola – but it also leaves many of the characters and their inner conflicts underdeveloped.

Ultimately one however wonders whether Catch a Fire actually serves as anything else but agitprop for the ruling party since it does nothing except scratch at old wounds that should preferably be left to heal if we're going to address this country's many problems. . .

Catch a Fire opens in South Africa on 9 February 2007