A handsome man and a lovely pregnant woman pick their way past strewn garbage and over rivulets of sewage in Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, that is home to 800,000 people. The two watch a performance of a musical number taking place on an open-air stage. The subject of this festive act: AIDS.
While the apparent intimacy of Arnold Bluhm, a black doctor, and Tessa Quayle, a white relief worker, teases the racial anxieties of director Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of “The Constant Gardener,” it’s this bold if brief revelation of place and people that astounds.
“I wanted to bring the filming to the streets,” said the director by phone. “I wanted to show the country.”
“The Constant Gardener” – John le Carré’s thriller about
pharmaceutical company avarice, government corruption and the abuse of Kenyan citizens – was not alone in turning a more thoughtful gaze on Africa. Over the past year, a number of movies have turned their klieg lights on a world once unapologetically
characterized as the Dark Continent. “Cry, the Beloved Country,” Alan Paton’s seminal novel about South Africa and apartheid, was made into a movie twice. The first version starred Sidney Poitier and came out in 1951, 43 years before apartheid met its end.
If the recent trend of Africa-based movies doesn’t exactly prove that first-world filmmakers are taking Africa to heart, it at least suggests that Hollywood greenlighters are reading the headlines.
Ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region of Sudan, famine in Niger, the AIDS pandemic (the biggest cause of death in Africa) – those stories about African countries and their woes finally have been getting more consistent front-page attention. And conflict and crisis can be the stuff of drama.
It started in earnest with last year’s “Hotel Rwanda,” starring Don Cheadle as hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who was credited with saving hundreds of lives during Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. (HBO did its own fine version on the tragedy, “Sometimes in April.”) Earlier this year there was “The Interpreter,” Sydney Pollack’s thriller starring Nicole Kidman as an African woman working at the U.N. who has roots in a fictional country’s liberation struggle.
On art-house screens, John Boorman’s “In My Country” showed Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche as an African-American journalist and an Afrikaner poet who meet during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings.
Even the action romp “Sahara” – with its adventurers traversing a number of African nations – attempted to take Africa and its issues more seriously.
But “serious” can be a relative term for big-screen depictions that try to entertain while touching on the real-life disasters of civil war, drought and rampant corruption.
“Cardboard cutouts”
“If you think about the images of Africa, they’re just so ludicrous,” said Martin Cuff, former head of the Cape Film Commission in South Africa. “My biggest criticism of Hollywood’s portrayal of Africa is that it’s simplistic, that it rarely takes the time to address who the Africans are, what they want, how they live their lives.”
In June, Cuff moved from Cape Town to become director of the Colorado Film Commission.
“Hollywood deals in shadow men, cardboard cutouts. Eddie Murphy’s ‘Coming to America?’ Wouldn’t you want to weep at the portrayal of an entire continent that way?
“Do you remember the cooking pots in ‘King Solomon’s Mines?”‘ asked Cuff. “I was living in Zimbabwe at the time and remember driving up and down the road where (the cooking pots) … were, realizing only later that the idea of the movie was that Sharon Stone would be thrown into them.”
Cuff said the simplistic approach of Hollywood means that for moviegoers, “It becomes this homogenous continent. It denies the myriad cultures and experiences. It’s presented as ‘I’m going to Africa. Not I’m going to Cameroon or Gabon.”‘
Africa is made up of 47 nations, many of which wrestled their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s. More than 2,000 languages are spoken. That makes for an array of compelling and complex stories.
One notable improvement in the recent movies is how they acknowledge national borders and complex geographies. In “Sahara,” hero Dirk Pitt travels from Niger to Mali (the movie was shot in Morocco).
In the amorality tale “Lord of War,” Nicolas Cage’s arms dealer hawks lethal wares to Liberia. The military leader of that country is doing brisk and nasty business with his next-door neighbor in Sierra Leone. In the last day on location for “The Constant Gardener,” director Meirelles and a small crew shot a food drop in Sudan.
S. Africa, posing as Africa
Of course, not all onscreen locales are visions of the real deal.
One of the reason we’re seeing more images of Africa is that some of its nations are making themselves into reasonably cheap places to do the expensive work of moviemaking.
If Toronto tarts itself up to stand in for many an American city, South Africa is all too happy to be the country-double for hot zones like Sierra Leone and Liberia.
“‘Lord of War’ was all shot within an hour and a half of Cape Town,” said Cuff, who was instrumental in getting major productions to shoot in South Africa. “That’s how I started promoting it. You know all those places you can’t go, we can do this for you.”
It’s a come-on that works for film production companies and their insurers, but not necessarily as well as one might imagine for South Africa, Cuff said.
“I don’t think the profile of South Africa has been particularly assisted by this sort of production,” he said. “Because it doesn’t show us.”
Meirelles, who decided against filming in South Africa, agreed but for slightly different reasons.
“South Africa is like any other Western country. People use the same Gap, wear the same Levis. It really looks like Los Angeles, actually.” (“Ask the Dust,” Robert Towne’s much-anticipated version of John Fante’s Depression saga was shot in South Africa because Cape Town looked so much like 1930s Los Angeles.)
What attracted Meirelles to “The Constant Gardener” in the first place was the opportunity to shoot in Kenya, which he had visited twice before.
“From the beginning I wanted to shoot the movie like a documentary,” Meirelles said. “I wanted to shoot real people in real places. Kenya is like somewhere 40 years ago. The problem with shooting in Kenya was actually insurance. It was very, very expensive. The embassy was bombed in Nairobi six years ago, remember? Because of that this became a very dangerous place for the insurance companies. Or at least, it was a good excuse to charge us a lot of money.”
Of course, major movies (even those produced by indie studios) don’t occur in a vacuum – political or economic.
In late August, Focus Features issued a news release announcing the production of “Hot Stuff.” The Phillip Noyce film, about the strife in South Africa from the 1980s to the present, stars Derek Luke and Tim Robbins and is being shot on location in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Mozambique.
Focus co-presidents David Linde and James Schamus said the “film will take an exciting and relevant look at a time and place that the world must never forget, or stop learning from.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
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Three of the best films featuring Africa
Scantily clad natives drumming furious messages about Bwana. Handsome couples finding romance amid the sinister colonial control. Well-meaning white activists featured as the lead protagonists for films about apartheid. To say that mainstream movies have had a checkered past when it come to Africa is an understatement.
Still here are three films worth another look, not because they’re perfect, but because they’re rich in contradiction:
“Hotel Rwanda”: Granted, this movie focused on a silver lining in an impossibly dark sky. But Terry George’s film about the Rwanda genocide is one of the few movies to feature a black African as the hero – one for us all.
“Black Hawk Down”: As stereotyped as the Somali war lord in Ridley Scott’s deft combat flick, above, is, Scott’s look at the U.S. debacle in Mogadishu is one of the few movies to concede that as screwed up and corrupt as the place may be, it has rules of its own. And we ignore them at our own peril.
“Cry, the Beloved Country”: Few things are as chastising as a sensitive movie failing to change the course of history. Yet few things are as intriguing as revisiting a film to see what it got right and what it couldn’t allow itself to see. In the case of Zoltan Korda’s 1951 film, this meant the sheer, venal tenacity of apartheid in South Africa.
