Stander

Stander (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)

2003 / South Africa / 111 minutes

“In case you have a short memory, this is a fucking robbery!”

Director: Bronwen Hughes / Screenplay: Bima Stagg / Director of Photography: Jess Hall / Music: The Free Association / Production: Martin Katz, Chris Roland and Julia Verdin for Grosvenor Park Productions / Cast: Thomas Jane (Andre Stander), Dexter Fletcher (Lee McCall), David Patrick O’Hara (Allan Heyl), Deborah Kara Unger (Bekkie Stander), Ashley Taylor (Cor van Deventer), Marius Weyers (General Stander), Melanie Merle (Shar), Bonginkosi Mavimbela (Robert Mnguni).

Like 24 Hour Party People, Bronwen Hughes’s exceptionally exhilarating but frustratingly underseen South African Crime masterpiece Stander is based on an incredible true story very specific to a time and place. And like 24HPP, the film’s most outlandish and unbelievable events are the ones that actually happened.

    Opening in late ’70’s, apartheid era Johannesburg, Stander follows Andre Stander (Thomas Jane), a charismatic Afrikaans detective and son of a respected General. On the surface, Stander has it all- he’s well liked and admired by his macho crew of white cops, rewarded for bravery by his superiors and has recently been given a “Second chance” by his beautiful wife Bekkie (Deborah Kara Unger).

   But Stander is haunted by the death of Robert Mnguni (Bonginkosi Mavimbela), a black protestor he shot dead during a riot, largely because all of his colleagues and bosses thinking so little of the- completely legal- police killing of an unarmed man. Realising that he lives in a society where a white man can literally get away with anything, Stander begins dealing with his guilt and indulging his self- destructive nature by robbing banks during his lunch hour- then returning to investigate his own crimes later the same day.

   Over several months, Stander continually ups the stakes to make his robberies more shocking and spectacular but is so conflicted that he also goes out of his way to drop hints to the banks and his fellow officers that he’s the one responsible. When he’s finally caught it seems like at east part of him has deliberately let it happen. He even asks his detective mate Cor (Ashley Taylor) what took him so long to work it out.

   In prison, Stander befriends experienced bank robbers Allan Heyl (David Patrick O’Hara) and Lee McCall (Dexter Fletcher) and the three of them pull off an escape plan every bit as audacious as one of his heists. Becoming known as the “Stander Gang”, they go straight back to robbing banks in order to continue “Fucking with the system” and to fund an extravagant lifestyle as famous criminals openly admired by much of the public.

   However, Stander’s overwhelming guilt over Mnguni’s death and regrets about betraying his wife and father mean that his self- sabotaging impulses are never far away and his celebrity status threatens to put the rest of the gang and Lee’s girlfriend Shar (Melanie Merle) in the firing line…

    A heist thriller with a political conscience, Stander is made by Jane’s brilliant performance in the title role. Looking like a young, Subway- era Christopher Lambert with his bleached hair, he’s at once funny and tragic and brings the enigmatic cop turned robber to electrifying life. Although presented throughout the film as a borderline suicidal thrill- seeker doing what he does as a political statement (the gang are shown giving cash away to black beggars in the street), it’s unlikely the real Stander was ever as anti- apartheid but even today, very little is known about his true motivations.

   After depicting the gang’s last stand and Heyl’s escape (he’s still alive and now works as a motivational speaker after several years inside in the UK), the film ends with Stander impersonating a look-alike often mistaken for him to get out of the country and making it to Florida. Here, Jane plays him as a man out of both place and time, finally realising his age and forever stuck in an alien environment where he’ll never really fit in.

   The real Stander was indeed shot dead by the Miami Police Department (although in slightly different circumstances than those in the film’s final scene) but he was completely unknown in the US and his story would take decades to leave South Africa. This was a combination of the regime trying to make sure such an embarrassment was forgotten about as well as the international sanctions against the country until Mandela’s release and the end of apartheid in the early ’90’s.

   Although the film does take a few liberties to make Stander more sympathetic to modern audiences, a lot of viewers do struggle with the protagonist shooting an innocent man in the first few minutes. But it’s the shockingly routine normality of Mnguni’s killing that is the point and what drives Stander to do what he later does. “I’m on trial for robbing banks” he says in court, “But I have killed unarmed people”.

   In addition to O’Hara and Fletcher (both excellent as the Stander gang’s other two members), Jane is brilliantly supported by fellow Canadian Deborah Kara Unger as Bekkie, probably the only character in the film to come close to working her husband out. Unger was one of the most dependable and distinctive leading ladies of the ’90’s and ’00’s yet never really reached the heights she should have done.

   Having made a memorable major debut by refusing a body double for some lengthy nudity in Highlander III (1994), she later took the same fearlessness to further extremes in Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) before landing a more mainstream leading role opposite Michael Douglas in David Fincher’s The Game in 1997 (a part she got through the unorthodox route of sending Fincher a tape of her sex scenes from Crash).

   Largely ignored upon it’s American release due to a confused marketing strategy (the international theatrical trailer could almost be for a different film), Stander did do reasonably well in the UK, although it didn’t appear here until 2005. It also kicked off a brief run of South African films that were more successful in foreign markets, including Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2006), Steven Silver’s The Bang Bang Club (2010) and most notably, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.