A LABOR OF LOVE LATE DIRECTOR'S PASSION TRANSLATES TO SCREEN, AS FILM'S STARS CAN ATTEST.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

You don't approach a film version of ``Boesman & Lena'' - Athol Fugard's apartheid-era play about a displaced black South African couple at the end of their emotional rope - expecting to enjoy it.

A sense of obligation, maybe; dedication, definitely; perhaps even the elusive work ethic that's often described as a labor of love. But you don't do it for the pleasure, the money or the entertainment value.

In the case of stars Danny Glover and Angela Bassett and the film's recently deceased director, John Berry, the impetus was much loftier than all of that. Which made it all very rewarding, in a way that the world's ``Lethal Weapons'' and ``How Stella Got Her Groove Backs'' aren't.

Often demanding, even debilitating, but worth it.

``This was just an opportunity to really use the gifts that I believe I've been given, to really go deep,'' says the classically trained, Yale-educated Bassett, well-known for her film portrayals of Tina Turner in ``What's Love Got to Do With It?'' and activist Betty Shabazz in ``Malcolm X.'' ``Not that I don't try to find something in every project that I love and that I can attach myself to, but sometimes it doesn't require all of you. It doesn't really require that you go to those difficult places and tough emotions and to be there every moment.

``It's kind of scary,'' she admits. ``It's like when I did Lady Macbeth in New York; going down to that theater was scary every day, going to that madness at the end. But you only felt a wonderful sense of satisfaction when you did go there, and that's what this was for me.''

Glover's relationship to Fugard's work dates back to an early New York production of ``Master Harold ... and the Boys'' that first brought him prominence as an actor.

``In my journey to a place where I thought I wanted to go as an artist, Fugard gave me the best opportunity to do so,'' Glover says. ``His writing, his work - perhaps embedded in there were ways in which I was able to relieve my own fear and attach myself to thoughts and ideas that were a dramatic realization of my own. The fact that he dealt so delicately with how people relate within the context of the most extreme and brutal social system may have drawn me to that. That and the fact that he just gave you great language!''

For Glover, who has appeared in several South Africa-set films over the years, filming on location, outside of Cape Town - primarily, a desolate mudbank where the recently evicted Boesman and Lena settle for a night of recrimination over a life's worth of displaced resentment - added a new dimension to a subject he'd explored before.

``The fact that we were there in South Africa, that we could smell the place and see the vistas and hear people's laughter, all had a major influence in direct and indirect ways on the work at hand,'' says Glover, who balances his busy acting schedule with, among other philanthropic endeavors, duties as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Program. ``In that sense, you draw from that. More and more, as you get into this, the more things you're able to smile upon, just from the standpoint of how our human family is interconnected. I'm always in awe of how we can relate images that we saw in Cape Town to images that we saw growing into our own lives.''

Of course, the American actors also felt a certain sense of isolation - not nearly as profoundly as the homeless characters they were playing, but perhaps instructive to their performances.

``I knew it was the right idea to shoot it there,'' Bassett acknowledges. ``But I knew it wasn't going to feel good, it wouldn't be nice and it would be an awful, awful long way from home. I was newly married (to actor-director Courtney B. Vance) and my husband wasn't going to be able to get there over the weekend. I mean, I'd never been to a foreign country - well, Canada, but that's hardly - and to really live there was something to experience.''

Trying to make everyone feel at home, though, was director Berry. A New York political and theatrical radical (he acted in an early stage production of Richard Wright's ``Native Son'') and Hollywood blacklist exile who did much of his work overseas, Berry was an early Fugard collaborator, having directed a London production of the author's ``Blood Knot'' in 1962, among others.

Berry was 82 when ``Boesman & Lena'' filmed last year. He died Nov. 29, 1999, a few days before completing post-production.

``John Berry had a very intuitive connection to the people who were on the other side, the outside, of society,'' Glover recalls. ``He had great stories to tell, and he was very open; great stories about approaching other people's humanity.''

``No preconceptions about who these people are,'' Bassett adds, ``maybe because he had a long history with these type of projects. You felt, from him, just a great love affair that he had with people who most of the world would just prefer not to see - or know exist - because it's not a pretty picture.

``And everything he was feeling just showed on his face,'' Bassett says, awe that only an actor could fully appreciate for such a thing welling in her voice. ``If something moved him, he would weep right there in front of you. He didn't hide it or mask it or whatever. Maybe he figured, y'know, 'I'm 82, I can just be who I am and feel what I feel and not be ashamed of it.' ''

Which is another, rare kind of experience worth making sacrifices for.

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Danny Glover and Angela Bassett star in the apartheid-era story about a resettled couple in ``Boesman & Lena.'' ``He had great stories to tell, and he was very open,'' Glover says of the film's recently deceased director, John Berry.