pfgpowell-1 Review of Stander

Stander (2003)

A great deal better and more honest than many similar films

[7/10 · 27 November 2009]

For £1 in your local supermarket's bargain bin (€1.10 and $1.65 at the time of writing) you don't really expect the DVD you picked up on a whim to amount to much. But Stander is a revelation and quite why Morrison's had already relegated it to junk status, I don't know. Another drawback - or apparent drawback - was the legend on the cover 'Based on a true story', which usually means 'we got the idea from something that happened and glammed it up'. Yet Stander sticks pretty close to the facts. Andre Stander, at one point the youngest police captain in South Africa and the son of a respected general, starts robbing banks while still serving. Later, once he has escaped jail, he forms the very successful Stander Gang and carries on his life of crime. As portrayed in the film, greed is apparently not his motive. The film suggests that he after killing a man while on riot duty he simply loses faith with the establishment and decides to f*** the system. Biographical details I have looked up suggest he had some sort of breakdown after his brother was killed in a crash and he had to identify the body. But what is remarkable about the film is that despite a storyline which is as close to fiction as life is ever going to get, nothing is sensationalised. Stander's relationships with his father, his former wife and his friends all ring true and Bronwen Hughes, the American writer/director plays it straight without, however, playing boring. There are several quite moving scenes in the film as when, for example, Stander seeks out the father of the man he killed and allows him to take his revenge. Whether of not that happened I don't know, but the film doesn't play it for cheap emotions. There is another scene where Stander tries to persuade his former wife to leave the country with him. She refuses, obliquely admitting that she, too, hates the apartheid system in which they all live, but that she has found a way of accommodating it. In fact, it is pretty obvious that she feels betrayed by Stander who had more or less thrown away a happy life with her. Honesty is, in fact, the hallmark of Hughes's film. Worth more than being given a chance. You might even be persuaded to go out of your way to watch it. Scenes which in less subtle hands might have made this just another run-of-the-mill movie - for example, the way it the rottenness at the core of the regime, also ring true. I puzzled that I had never before heard of this film, or why it is already languishing in a bargain bin valued at merely £1. It is worth every penny, and then some.