Word: du
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...nothing more than the increasingly common disdain many Chinese appear to feel for the army they saw as their great protector before it marched on Tiananmen, this small, fine-boned woman with searing brown eyes and a complexion Margaret Thatcher would compare to a rose recites some lines of Du Fu, the 8th century poet famous for decrying the gulf between ruled and ruler in China: "So it is better to abandon a daughter at birth than to see her later married to a soldier...
Prices vary from 85 cents for an eight-ounce cup of coffee to $2.10 for Cappuccino. The Coffee Connection in the Garage offers identical prices, though those of Au Bon Pain, Express and Croissant du Jour are lower...
...reason for the picture's impact is its straight-ahead melodramatic structure. At its simplest level the movie functions as a well-constructed mystery story. A black man, a gardener named Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), comes to his employer, Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), asking him to help find his son. The boy was taken into police custody during the Soweto protests of 1976 and has disappeared. Du Toit, a calm and rational man, believes this is surely just a bureaucratic muddle that can be easily ameliorated by a solid citizen's firm but polite intervention...
...talking bureaucracy here. We are talking about a strangely imperturbable menace. Searching for his son, Ngubene is also arrested; father and boy are tortured and then murdered in prison. And because Du Toit continues to seek justice on their behalf, he is himself victimized by state terror that is the more frightening because of the bland face with which it covers its institutionalized psychopathy. Du Toit is subjected to steadily escalating harassment. Eventually he loses his job and his wife (Janet Suzman in a good, dour performance), and he must deal with the fact that his daughter is willing...
...that the best thing about A Dry White Season is that it does not practice unconscious apartheid. Our attention may be focused on the political education of Ben du Toit, but the Ngubene family is well particularized and their torments set forth unblinkingly, not to say horrifically. And Ben is provided with a guide to the realities of life on the other side of the color line: the tough, suspicious, ultimately compassionate taxi driver named Stanley (Zakes Mokae). He is a man who turns up in surprising places in unpredictable moods. He provides the bestartlements that shake Du Toit...