Mrs Mandela

[kitty11]

Mr. M. will be playing Major Theunis Swanepoel, security police interrogator (also known as "The Butcher of Soweto", which says it all really ) in Mrs Mandela, a BBC drama on the rise of Winnie Mandela.

Here is the BBC link

My main concern (and hope) is that he can pull off the accent

kitty

[lilly]

Thanks for the heads-up on this, chiquita.

With regard to assaying the accent specifically, I've long found that the "beauty of diminished expectations" principle is frequently helpful...

[victoriao]

Mrs Mandela is screening on BBC4 later this month. Today's Observer carries an interview with Sophie Okonedo which also references the 'terrifying greasy-haired intensity' of Mr Morrissey's performance, and there's a sneak preview here. Sounds deeply harrowing but one to watch...

[lilly]

Absolutely brilliant interview, thanks so much for passing it along--perhaps unsurprisingly, I was immensely cheered by the fact that Mr. Morrissey's life is evidently normal enough for him to take the tube without being unduly molested by crazed fangirls.

And for those of you who like me are unable to watch the clip ("Not available in your area"--yeah, buddy, tell me something I don't know), Celia has kindly supplied a screencap:



*stops to do extended celebratory Happydance of Glorious Pornostache Goodness*

Seriously, though, I can't wait to see this (though of course I'd better learn to appreciate the joys of delayed gratification with regard to seeing this project, like most of 'em), because I've yet to see Mr. Morrissey in a role where he's thoroughly contemptible and/or irredeemable.

w00t![/b]

And I'm also inclined to cut him a break regarding the accent--regardless of how it turns out--because after watching Philip Glenister in the U.S. premiere of Demons this past weekend, I have a whole new definition of Faux Accent Auditory Pain. *shrieks, claps hands over ears*

[kitty11]

Thanks for the links Celia! Might need to do some playing with my compie's proxy software to see if it can make that trailer play for me

It's great hearing about another actor not buying into the Hollywood machine and playing the game on her terms LOL, yeah, I also found it pretty cool (and heartening) that he could take PT about and be 'normal' that way like the rest of us But back on the subject at hand, oooh, can't wait for this one, though agreed, it sounds like a terribly intense watch!

LMAO, can I second Lilly's unashamed glee at the sight of the porno mo' making a return again?! I'm not normally into moustaches, but he's got to be one of the few people on the planet that carries it off. Maybe it's his ol' school handsomeness *grins impishly*

It also sounds from the article that his accent is fine, so I hope that's the case. While I can forego bad accents to some extent, it would really be a distraction in this role seeing as he's being straight out EV-IL. And there's a harshness to the sound of the Afrikaan accent that, if done right, would add quite significantly to the menace...

*drifts off at thought of his voice in Afrikaan form*



Edit: Just saw vid. Accent is just fine *clappy hands*

Sorry, I've really got to stop fetishizing accents and voices I'm sure his actual performance in this film will be fabulous too!

kitty

P.S. - Off to see "Nowhere Boy" tomorrow evening, finally!

[victoriao]

Mrs Mandela will be on BBC4 this Monday, 25 January, at 21.00

There's another BBC link here: scroll down to the bottom for a pic of Mr M. I've tried, and unfortunately failed, to find a picture of the real Theunis Swanepoel for comparison

[lilly]

Jan 23, 2010 22:47:22 GMT @victoriao said:

I've tried, and unfortunately failed, to find a picture of the real Theunis Swanepoel for comparison

Boy howdy, you ain't half kiddin'--MSN & Google image searches turned up nada for me either. Of course, given what information I was able to dig up on the guy--which was consistently horrifying--I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this visual documentation was intentionally suppressed. (I certainly would like to track Swanepoel down and kick his racist thug ass into next week if he weren't dead already.)

However, I was able to locate some physical descriptions, starting with this wonderful interview with Albie Sachs (which I ended up reading in its entirety--what an amazing, inspirational man):

"And the head was a Colonel Swanepoel. 'Rooi Rus' (Red Russian) they called him. It's like he cultivated ugliness. I don't think how people appear is significant about them at all. But it was as though he liked the fact that he had short, cropped, reddish hair and bloodshot eyes and a thick neck. And heavy ham-fisted hands which he would slam onto the table, and a bellowing voice. And he was notorious. People had died -- I knew that -- had died under his interrogations. And then, bam, bam, bam, screaming and shouting and start banging the table, then total quiet. And eventually I feel my resistance going."

Now, admittedly that description is slightly contradictory to this one, which says, "Swanepoel's gray hair was cropped like a Prussian's. His face was a bloodred morass of broken veins--hence his nickname Rooi Rus, the Red Russian. Swanepoel was a man who gave off great blasts and gusts of energy. His movements were rapid and agitated, his speech a jackhammer in your face. It seemed an ongoing struggle for him to control himself..."

But in any case, here's some further background on the, "Butcher of Soweto" moniker from this site, along with establishing his eventual fate, as celia has asked me about:

"The police commander who is believed to have given the command to fire at the schoolchildren on the day, Theuns 'Rooi Rus' Swanepoel, was described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998 as a policeman 'who already had a long history of human rights violations as chief interrogator of the security branch.'

Swanepoel told the TRC: 'I made my mark. I let it be known to the rioters I would not tolerate what was happening. I used appropriate force. In Soweto and Alexandra where I operated, that broke the back of the organisers.'

Swanepoel allegedly lost his right eye in the incident. He died of a heart attack in 1998 at the age of 71."

Definitely doesn't sound like he got the extraordinarily painful end that he so eminently deserved after having inflicted so much worse on his countless victims.

[lilly]

That bastion of utmost fabulosity known as felix has struck again, via having referred me to this clip which thankfully is viewable even to those of us not in the U.K.

[kitty11]

Thanks for the links Lilly - I know only a tidbit of the history (obviously much of the focus is on Mr. rather than Mrs. Mandela), so I'll need to check out those links in more detail

Dang, that clip was creepy...it had me getting the shivers, I must say. And he wasn't even doing anything nasty yet

kitty

[victoriao]

Seconded re the all the background info, Lilly As I said at Twitter, after the drama ended I found myself wondering what happened to Swanepoel - whether he was still alive when the apartheid regime ended, and whether he was ever brought to any kind of justice. We all know what happened to Nelson and Winnie Mandela, but I'm sure I wasn't the only person watching who was left wondering about Swanepoel as well.

As for Mrs Mandela, I've been meaning for weeks to check in and post a response and some screencaps (just lifted from iPlayer I'm afraid - best I could do). I thought it was very impressive - it lived up to its billing as a compelling, often harrowing piece of drama, and superbly acted. The narrative opened with Winnie Mandela accompanying her husband on his release from jail, then moved backwards and forwards through her life, from the early days of their courtship, through his incarceration, her harassment at the hands of the authorities, her resistance, her growing militancy and finally her involvement in the kidnapping and murder of fourteen year old Stompie Moeketsi in 1989. At the heart of the film was Winnie Mandela’s own period of incarceration: over 400 days spent in solitary confinement without trial, and subjected to repeated and intimidatory police interrogation. The drama returned again and again to moments from this experience, forming a series of traumatic flashbacks. The implication was that although she emerged apparently unharmed, she was – as of course you’d expect - deeply psychologically scarred. Her part in Stompie Moeketsi’s murder was not excused, but the drama suggested that her brutalisation at the hands of the authorities helped to shape her into a person capable carrying out an extreme act of violence. It culminated in a near-unwatchable sequence in which Mrs Mandela’s intimidation and abuse of the young Moeketsi was intercut with the most intense and slavering of Swanepoel’s intimidation of her in prison, making a reality Swanepoel’s earlier, creepily ambiguous assertion that ‘you could be one of us’.

The scenes of interrogation were particularly chilling for their calculation: if this drama is to believed Swanepoel was a master of manipulation: one reviewer aptly described him as ‘deploying every weapon in his disgusting psychological armoury’ (annoyingly I can’t now remember the source or I’d post the link). Nothing was too low: emotional blackmail, playing on her feelings for her husband, appealing to her vanity, implying imminent rape; alternately cajoling, leering, ominously hinting or out-and-out screaming in her face… one can only imagine the effect of such sustained abuse on an already exhausted, frightened woman. Add to this the fact she’d be returned to her cell afterwards to spend hours alone, churning all this around in her mind… doesn’t bear thinking about. I need hardly add that the power of these scenes was down to the performances – both Sophie Okonedo and Mr Morrissey were magnificent. The press seem to think Ms Okonedo is a shoo-in for a BAFTA nomination next year but I wouldn’t rule out a supporting actor nod for Mr M either.

But enough of me – on to the screencaps. For reasons linked to the fact that a strip on the extreme right hand side of my laptop screen has gone blank and I can’t see that bit of any image, I’m struggling to resize caps in Picture Manager (the bit where the controls are is also the bit that’s out of action). I’ve had to guess sizes – I really hope they’re not too large.

Enjoy (if that’s the right word)…

[victoriao]

Batch 2. This is where things get even more intense. More sweaty, more scary, more saliva-ey. Fasten your seatbelts....

[kitty11]

Having watched Mrs. Mandela on Sunday night, I felt the need to let it settle a bit before posting, even though it offered much food for thought afterwards.

I'd agree with Celia wholeheartedly in saying that this is an excellent drama that kept me hooked in from start to finish. It reminded me of a local film here I'd watched recently called 'Animal Kingdom', which is a family drama set in Melbourne's criminal underworld. While their premises are quite different, both of these films were fantastic character studies that used the push and pull of relationships to instill a tremendous (as in fundamentally squirm inducing) tension with relatively minimal violence, given their repsective subject matters.

It was a tad challenging at first getting a grasp of the three intercutting plot streams (if you could call them that), as described by Celia above (i.e., Winne and Nelson post his release from prison, Winnie and Nelson pre and during his incarceration, Winnie's incarceration and exchanges with Swanepoel), but once I got the hang of it, it was fascinating to watch. Especially the dynamic of her and Nelson's devolving relationship, and seeing Mr. Mandela portrayed in an unusually less than flattering light as a rather patriarchal and patronising individual who at times appeared quite emotionally out of tune with his wife. You really got the sense of him being this ever present shadow in Winnie's life, yet abstracted in so many ways as a husband, and not just because he was incarcerated and unable to be present for the family.

I was also struck by the aforementioned tension that builds throughout the film, a growing sense of anger and frustration on Winnie's part as political forces serve to split apart her family, eventually grinding her down. While her imprisonment and torture at the hands of Swanepoel was harrowing, I found the part where she is thrown out of home and taken to a township where she's essentially in solitary confinement, not permitted to associate with her fellow townsfolk, particularly heartbreaking to watch The conclusion, as Celia mentioned, really wanted to pitch the idea that she had become just like Swanepoel, and I found that quite disappointing, as I felt it simplified and drew attention from the fact that she did have this (justifiably, IMO) pent-up anger and frustration borne out of being powerless to fight the situation at hand (although certainly not for lack of trying, especially given her station in that society, being both black and female). I do agree that the film doesn't cast moral judgement on Winnie or her actions, but was concerned that they would make this comparison in intimating she had become an 'oppressor' when it's really not that simple an argument to put forward (sickening as her actions were, which they were). At least that was my interpretation of it, though this final scene could be interpreted in a manner of ways, I'm sure

As for DM, he's, well, amazing, all khaki gear and porno-style mo' and spittle and harsh Afrikkans accent ;D Bloody downright scary too! Goodness, I loved how the film sought to intercut Winnie in her idle moments, for example thinking while being driven in a car, with a sudden flash of Swanepoel taunting or yelling at her. It really served to reinforce how terrifyingly insidious psychological--as opposed to physical--torture can be in grinding down a person's psyche with doubts and fears, even years after the fact. Upon going to bed, I was genuinely worried I would wake up the next morning in horror after dreaming of him screaming at me, "Wake up!!!", just like Winnie does in the film

But yeah, enough ranting. Overall it's two thumbs up from me

kitty