Freedom Cry
In My Country
Directed by John Boorman
Always dynamic, John Boorman also has a subtle, explorative filmmaking style. Classics like Point Blank, Deliverance and Excalibur were popular kinetic spectacles, but each one was a distinct meditation on time, morality and mythology. Boorman has the great film artist's capacity to transcend genre and innovate exciting narrative forms-as with his new film In My Country, which dramatizes the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that occurred in the mid 90s.
Thank god a dull filmmaker didn't take on that subject and turn it into one of those feel-bad, do-gooder movies. Boorman treats the dismantling of apartheid as a metaphysical mystery. Exploring politics and human nature, Boorman's first shot establishes a contemplation of the vast and intimidating land itself. Boorman then takes an enraptured approach to what can be called the landscape of the human face. He closely follows a white South African writer and radio journalist Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche) and a black American correspondent from the Washington Post, Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) as they observe the national spectacle of grief and redemption.
The TRC hearings permitted black and white South Africans to tell of their abuse by either police or native rebels. Accused perpetrators also got to tell their stories. But in order to get amnesty from Nelson Mandela's new government, their full confessions had to prove that they were politically motivated-or else jail sentencing is enforced. Boorman presents each hearing like a chorale, intercutting the anxious testimonies of victims and their abusers with the faces of patient, attentive judges and then the anxious, skeptical or devastated responses of the journalists.
This interweaving of experiences (poignant, readable faces combined with stern or nervous voices) has a convulsive effect and sweeps viewers up in the emotion and history. Like Anna and Langston, our presuppositions about crime and punishment are shaken by this extraordinary humanistic effort. It tests our threshold for empathy. One startling camera move pitches forward as a woman expounds about her travails; and this unexpected rush of immediacy-the physical closeness of pain-imparts a sense of vertigo. Boorman, that great kineticist, is in command of a new moral dynamism.
Working on location in South Africa and with a mix of nonprofessional and trained actors, Boorman lets a sense of place lead to an appreciation of each character's countenance and individual experience. (When Menzi Ngubane as Dumi, the journalists' driver, goes off into the night to find an auto mechanic, Boorman conveys his ironic sense of freedom in this once hostile place.) Due to his remarkable perceptive gift, Boorman doesn't have to emphasize issues because he is so extraordinarily attentive to life details. He plays radio broadcasts of TRC testimonies against a montage of various land, house and work spaces-an ingenious counterpoint that recalls Dennis Delrogh's interpretation of how the Godardian stacks of radios in Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade contrasted ancient lo-fi custom with modern ambivalent technology. In trial scenes relaying sorrow that has been privately assessed and then publicly expressed, the film puts us in the presence of something almost sacred. ("May we snatch the victims from the death of forgetfulness," says a presiding bishop.) Mercy is extended to the horrors of the past as well as to the difficulty of progress-moving forward without forgetting and without fear, like Dumi dancing into the darkness.
In My Country doesn't parcel out guilt, as is the convention of movies dealing with political atrocity; rather, Boorman captures the enormity of bearing witness. Anna and Langston, insider and outsider, white and black, male and female, initially clash because of their differences. But they come together when basic decency trumps self-righteous politics. Anna resents Langston's judgmental superiority (contemptuous of this bourgeois reporter's militant air, she refers to him as "Malcolm X"). Yet, the hearings force both of them to realize the pettiness of their intellectual sophistication.
Describing her fellow white Afrikaaners, Anna says, "These people are the marrow of my being. I cannot escape it, I cannot deny it yet I protest it." Binoche does surprising variations on culture shock. As Anna wrestles with her country's crimes, she risks the stability of her family life. A poet-turned-reporter (based on the memoir by Antjie Krog), she is distressed nearly to the breaking point: "The language in which I wrote about love and tenderness was used to diminish others, to humiliate people. What does that make me?" Such intense self-examination is part of Boorman's fresh approach. He transcends the typical liberal filmmaker's self-consciousness about racism and fascism (such as Alan Parker's insulting Mississippi Burning) because he accepts Anna's question about personal responsibility.
This forthrightness also explains Boorman getting a rare subtle performance from Samuel L. Jackson. Langston has little of Jackson's routine profane bluster. In fact, Boorman cools out that mock machismo when Langston gets an interview with Col. De Jager (Brendan Gleeson), one of the most brutal apartheid police who wants to use the TRC hearings to escape prosecution. "What I wouldn't give to get in a room with him," Langston brays. Their actual meeting is an honest stand-off of misguided masculine rage-precisely what gets distorted in trite race fantasies as The Boys from Brazil and Pulp Fiction. Boorman refuses such hysteria, despite his heated subject. By showing the complex apportioning of justice (the TRC hearing halls are adorned with posters saying "The Truth Shall Set Us Free"), this film gains credible moral weight.
And yet, In My Country feels like the airiest, simplest film Boorman has made since his 1990 trompe l'oeil domestic comedy Where the Heart Is. Boorman's filmmaking has not become overwrought with "seriousness" like Scorsese's recent hyperstylization; Boorman's emotional expression is now direct, his always-thrilling estheticism is purified to a humane essence. (There won't be a more graceful scene in 2005 than Anna's mother presenting Langston with a particular memento.) Boorman's aerial views are not merely landscapes; in fact, they're more contemplative than Olympian-high up yet aware of the down-to-earth human struggle. Impossibly green landscapes shame the fantasy-scapes in Lord of the Rings. Cinematographer Seamus Deasy's use of natural light is eerily serene, preserving a sense of wonder. Night scenes are surreal, almost monochrome like in Deliverance, making the anti-apartheid battle one of Boorman's consciousness-altering adventures. This film shows London-born Boorman's connection to global consciousness-specifically the South African concept of ubuntu, which Anna says "tells us we are not alone in this world." In Boorman's dynamic vision, that fact is made radiant.
Changing Times
Directed by André Téchiné
André Téchiné's Changing Times is another global vision. It makes the perfect link between In My Country and The Best of Youth for the way Téchiné combines a family chronicle with a contemporary sense of mutating politics. Set in Tangiers, the story explores the integration of worldly Europeans (Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu) into the mysteries of a Third World affected by Western capitalism. It is Téchiné's usual style to convey political issues through his characters' intimate sexual lives. Deneuve and Depardieu's romantic history becomes a believable metaphor for past colonial idealism-the romance that no longer works. But Téchiné complicates their story with other characters-the next generation that includes Deneuve's bisexual son and his Moroccan wife-caught up in the mess of drugs and industry.
This family epic harkens back to Téchiné's magnificent French Provincial, which compressed decades of family history into 90 minutes. It was an exercise in looking back while stepping forward that here, in Changing Times, still seems fresh. Boorman, Techine and Giordana are on the march.