Harrowing tale lacks punch
THE true story of David Tait is undoubtedly harrowing and moving.
Growing up in South Africa, where his expatriate English father worked in a bank, he was sexually abused by a group of his father’s friends. His mother, bullied by her overbearing husband, was unable to help.
Inevitably, he carried this terrible baggage into adulthood, blighting his relationship with his wife and child.
Julian Jarrold’s Sulphur And White chronicles all this, with Mark Stanley as the grown-up David.
Anna Friel and Dougray Scott play his parents, and Emily Beecham is his wife. That’s a pretty impressive cast, but if a story like this is to be told on screen, it has to be told very well.
Alas, Sulphur And White isn’t. As it whisks back and forth in time, it never finds a way of making us empathise with the adult David, so deeply unappealing that the film’s final redemptive chapter lacks the emotional punch it badly needs.
While there is much here to admire, it is undermined by some desperately clunky dialogue and twodimensional characterisation. A shame.
ESCAPE From Pretoria — also set in South Africa, also based on a real-life story — is, sadly, also a fail.
It stars a lavishly bearded Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Tim Jenkin, an antiapartheid campaigner sentenced to 12 years in jail in the late Seventies for distributing ‘subversive’ leaflets.
With two other prisoners, he hatches a plan to break out of Pretoria Central Prison by fashioning wooden replicas of the wardens’ keys.
It’s a good yarn, well worthy of cinematic attention. But Francis Annan’s film is dogged by some dubious South African accents, too many caricatures and far too many shots of keys turning, not turning and breaking in locks while an unseen synthesizer strains, wholly unsuccessfully, to build up tension.