Boesman & Lena

Essentially a love story, Boesman & Lenaexamines the progress of a couple's life together under Apartheid, as they are pushed from the bucolic Eden of South African farmlands into the slums of Cape Town. Through radiant flashbacks, beautifully filmed by director John Berry (He Ran All the Way, Claudine), we see the life that once was for these two, which included courtship, marriage and the birth of a child. Glover and Bassett vividly bring to life Boesman & Lena's downward spiral, which eventually forces them to a makeshift shelter on the mudflats near Cape Town. When the couple encounters an old Xhosa tribesman, he is abused by Boesman in the same way that Boesman himself had been abused by his white masters.

Written at a time when protest against apartheid in South Africa was routinely crushed, this play by the great Athol Fugard brings the sensibility of Beckett's Waiting for Godot to the horrors of life as a nonperson in a racially exclusive state. Two ragged wanderers--the bearish Boesman (Danny Glover) and the wilier Lena (Angela Bassett)--meet on a riverbank, where they try to scavenge food and firewood in order to survive the night. As they talk, their bitterness about the ways their lives have gone begins to come out, as well as the tragedies they've suffered at the hands of a racist government. Gradually, you realize that they've been husband and wife in a relationship that has been plundered by the poisonous influence of apartheid, reducing them to a level in which they have to remind themselves of their own humanity and their ability to make human connections. Director John Berry has opened it up somewhat, including flashbacks of the violence that has sundered their lives. It's grim, tough stuff, marked by extraordinary performances by Glover and Bassett. --Marshall Fine