Ankur Agarwal reviews Goodbye Bafana, also known as Color of Freedom.

Goodbye Bafana is another one of those American movies which completely lose the plot what cinema is all about. And instead start dosing you with hard to bear values like sexism and a child asking “Is it fair?” and thus shaking the soul of her otherwise ruthless father. It’s a little difficult to comprehend how much popcorn does the average American viewer need to consume before finally getting onto something else?

Besides the extremely weak script itself, the film loses whatever script it had by forgetting the element of personal. Based on James Gregory’s memoirs, even if ‘made up’, the film should have looked a first-person narrative rather than the pale third party one which does not know on whom to focus on, how to sweep up three decades of history in less than two hours, and which also wants to throw in the usual American family being looked after by the ‘man of the house’. The transition of Gregory (played by Joseph Fiennes) from a man who thought Mandela should have got the rope to a humbly following and listening, Freedom Charter-reading white man, who in due course of this remembers his boyhood friendship with a black boy and manages to balance work, family and his new-found leanings, is very, very far from convincing. Not to the discredit of Fiennes though! He has done his part as well as he could have in this weakly scripted and poorly directed film. Dennis Haysbert is seriously miscast as Mandela himself, and most of all he fails to bring forth the perennial heart-warming smile seen on the real Mandela’s face.

The film would have done well to focus on issues like the different routes taken by PAC and ANC, and the subsequent resort to violence by the ANC (as in the bomb blast incident shown in the film), rather than noting these things somewhere in the fleeting moments and dialogues of the film. And then focus on the jailer. And look at Mandela with questioning eyes: why violence? I also fail to understand the lack of subtext in the film: things which should actually have been shown in those fleeting moments that any film has. Like South Africa itself, the people, the landscape. Instead, what we’re presented with is just a very crude aerial shot of the island, acting as the frame changer in the film. Or the mood changer? Though it hardly changes. Finally, the film is just about a man keen on getting a promotion and his wife nagging him to get it, being worthless to do anything more herself than tell her children “Don’t question God” to that worn-out loaded question “Is it fair?”

[The film hits the Indian theaters on Friday 18 July.]

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