Tag: Fernando Meirelles

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes in the brilliant and moving The Constant Gardener

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Ralph Fiennes (Justin Quayle), Rachel Weisz (Tessa Quayle), Danny Huston (Sandy Woodrow), Hubert Koundé (Dr Arnold Bluhm), Archie Panjabi (Ghita Pearson), Bill Nighy (Sir Bernard Pellegrin), Gerard McSorley (Sir Kenneth Curtis), Pete Postlethwaite (Dr Lorbeer), Donald Sumpter (Tim Donohue), Richard McCabe (Arthur Hammond), Juliet Aubrey (Gloria Woodrow)

John Le Carré’s reputation as a spy novelist without peer can lead people to forget his books are often scathing condemnations of Western policy. The Constant Gardener, a superb adaptation of one of his finest novels, is no different. It’s a passionate, angry denunciation of how Western pharmaceutical companies, and their government partners, exploit the people of Africa. But it carries real force as it’s interwoven with a moving and tender study of grief and how it changes us, pushing us to see things from a different perspective. It’s that which gives the film its force.

Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) is a middle-ranking career diplomat, serving in the high commission in Kenya. His wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), an idealist determined to make a difference, is murdered. Justin determines to get to the bottom of her murder – and finds Tessa was investigating a British drugs company using the distribution of AIDS drugs to poverty-stricken Kenyans to test an experimental TB drug, covering up the harmful side effects and disposing of the dead. As flashbacks reveal Tessa’s investigation and motivations, Justin becomes ever more determined to unmask the drugs companies, and the figures in the British government protecting them.

Directed with vibrant urgency by Fernando Meirelles, The Constant Gardener is part thriller, part romance and part study of loss. Continuing his style from City of God, Meirelles’ camera work is jagged, hand-held and often unsettling, becoming ever more disjointed and edgy as the plot itself heads into darker and darker territory. The film throws us into its Kenyan setting, not shying away from the poverty of the villages. At one point, an aerial shot travels from the golf course, where the British are at play, across a train track and settles on the neighbouring slums.

This is all part of the film’s anger, which translates Le Carré’s feelings from the book. Inspired by the story of an aid worker he met in Cambodia in the 1970s (and who died in Kosovo in the 90s), the film is as furious as the novel at the heartless exploitation of Africa for the benefit of Western companies. Who counts the cost of Kenyan lives lost to experimental drugs? Certainly not the rich and powerful, who keep any consequences at a distance and rationalise them as for the greater good.

And not many have the courage to stand up to this. Most it seems are like Justin – good people who prefer not to think about, or look to deeply at, the impact we are having on the world. It takes a firebrand like Tessa to shake things up – and she pays a huge cost for it. Starting with Tessa’s death, the film feels at first like a mystery, but the culprits are all too obvious. Instead the question is why, not who, and the dark conspiracy that unfolds is really about establishing who knew what rather than who was involved (everyone, of course, was involved).

Rachel Weisz (winning the Supporting Actress Oscar for her work here) excels in a part that could have been a holier-than-thou left-wing agitator, but which she makes warm, human and real. Tessa is a woman who cares deeply, but also loves deeply, who is genuine, unaffected and speaks her mind. Weisz’ performance hits just the right notes, passionate but playful. The bond between her and Justin is real and based on a deep love on both their sides.

So warm is her performance, that you totally understand the all-consuming grief and loss Justin suffers at her death. It’s a very different sort of part for Fiennes – gentle, vulnerable, sweet, far different from his more patrician roles. He nails the part perfectly, bringing out of it a great deal of emotional force. The film is a tender exploration of the impact of grief on a person, and the mixture of shock, sorrow, anger and confusion in Fiennes’ performance feels completely real. This stillness and sombre approach to loss carries real weight.

The film becomes both a crusade – the husband taking up the cause of his slaughtered wife – but also an unusual romance. The greatest pain for Justin is discovering that his wife kept so much of her life secret from him. She did it to protect him, but he longs for the chance to prove to her that he could have been her “secret sharer”, that she could have trusted him. Effectively the film – and Justin’s quest – is to emotionally reunite with his wife, to fully understand her. The emotional heart of the film is this story, the husband effectively communing with the ghost of his wife, wanting there to be no more secrets keeping them apart.

This does mean that, at times, the conspiracy angle of the film gets slightly rushed. A late sequence effectively is four confessions from supporting characters to Justin in a row. The film gets a little bogged down in the mechanics of Justin chasing down various pieces of paper. The eventual quest to find the doctor behind the scandal (a wizened with guilt Pete Postlethwaite) offers a rather neat resolution. But it doesn’t matter too much as the film culminates in an ending that is as bizarrely bleak as it is hopeful.

Beautifully shot by Meirelles, with a raw immediacy that keeps the tension up, with a genuine sense of Kenyan life, it has a wonderful cast of character actors doing their bit (Bill Nighy as an arrogant senior diplomat and Danny Huston as a weasely coward stand out). It’s a film that is full of righteous fury at the West – but also with a tender beating heat for the pain of grief and the struggle with mourning. Emotional and political, it’s the finest Le Carré adaption on film.

City of God (2003)

Violence is a way of life in Fernando Meirelles calling card sensation City of God

Director: Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund (co-director)

Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues (Rocket), Leandro Firmino (Li’l Zé), Phellipe Haagensen (Benny), Douglas Silva (Li’l Dice), Jonathan Haagensen (Shaggy), Matheus Nachtergaele (Carrot), Seu Jorge (Knockout Ned), Jefechander Suplino (Clipper), Alice Braga (Angélica), Emerson Gomes (Stringy), Edson Oliveira (Older Stringy)

After Parasite’s win for Best Picture, it’s easy to remember the last foreign language film that made such a comparative impact at the Oscars – and it didn’t even win anything! Capturing the public imagination, City of God is that most American of things: a gangster film. Chronicling the life and death danger of the lawless slums of Rio de Janerio in the 1960s and 1970s, the film is an electric mixture of Latin and US film-making, a compelling shot of adrenalin that captured the imagination of the film-going public and made many Hollywood films look staid and dull.

Shot on location with a largely non-professional cast, the film uses as our window into this world aspirant photographer Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who has a front-row seat for an emerging (true life) gang war that erupts in the slumps between unstable psychopath Li’l Zé (Leandro Firmino) and his rival Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele) and bereaved former sniper turned bus conductor and killer Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge). Starting at the end, the film rewinds through time and moves from perspective to perspective in a series of dynamic short stories that slowly merge and meld together to complete the film’s whole.

The film is directed by Meirelles (who got an Oscar nomination) and Katia Lund (who didn’t). Meirelles invited Lund to collaborate with him on the project, and is generally credited with the film’s look, editing style, frenetic pace and distinctive style of sharply exposed Latin colours mixed with the look of a rock video, all dynamic angles and immersive action. Lund bought her documentary realism to the film, as well as working closely with the actors and helping to shape their parts of the story. Agreeing to take a specific “co-director” credit probably cost Lund the nomination, and it feels inexplicable she was unrecognised today, even more so since Lund has pioneered several successful TV series based around the world of the film.

Controversy aside, it’s a high water-mark certainly for Meirelles who has never quite managed to match it since (The Constant Gardener remains his best work since, marrying the dynamism here with one of Le Carré’s most emotional and strongest stories). With its lashings of Scorsese, Tarantino and De Palma (among others), City of God remains a hugely engaging and engrossing gangster flick that really feels like it captures the threat and grimy reality of the streets of Brazil. Each section of the city we see feels like a lawless wild west, where guns rule, the police have no say and a whole population of ordinary people keep their heads down and just try to avoid getting caught (literally) in the crossfire.

In this world violence is endemic, life is a short and brutish cycle of slaughter where danger leads inevitably to death, short-termism is the norm and a series of essentially childish young men see the excitement of crime turn into the brutality of a life of violence. None more so than the film’s vicious dark heart, Li’l Zé a young man with a flickering temper, a love of violence and death, barely able to relate to other people, unanchored in the world whose life is a self-destructive quest to be the biggest fish in his pond. Played with a swaggering panache by Leandro Firmino (and a chilling coldness as a child by Douglas Silva), the self-named Li’l Zé dominates the film as the sort of life-wire threat Joe Pesci used to be for Scorsese, never certain whether he will laugh or shoot.

Which makes him perfect for the unpredictability of the slums, where everyone wants to be a hood, drugs are rife and crime and murder is a legitimate way of living. The film splices together several short story narratives to illustrated this with Altmanesque confidence. Each section of the film is introduced as “the story of X”, all of them expanding from the starting story based around three wanna-be-hoodlums whose mixed fates reference everything from The Third Man to A Bout de Souffle. From this the film organically expands, using Li’l Zé as the fulcrum who hinges every other story around him towards disaster. It’s neatly cross-cut as well, starting the end before rewinding through a neat transition shot into the past to explain how we got where we are.

There seems to be no good deeds in the city. The most likeable character, Benny, is himself a gangster (and Li’l Zé’s only friend and restraining influence) who is fun-loving and cool while not adverse to theft and murder when needed. Kingpin Knockout Ned starts out as a man of good intentions, determined to clean up the town that has left him bereaved and hurt, but becomes consumed by the dark impact of violence. All the time, many of these gangsters are in love with their public image both the awe and fear they inspire in those around them as the most powerful people in the neighbourhood, and from their growing coverage in the press.

It’s a cycle that seems doomed to repeat itself, not least through the film’s introduction of “The Runts” a group of trigger happy pre-teen would-by gangsters, who roam through the streets waiting their chance to turn small stick-ups into a criminal empire. They are no more than following in the footsteps of Li’l Zé, shooting his gun and experiencing murder at their age and now zeroing on owning the whole slum. It’s the dark ambition of capitalism playing out on the streets.

The film works however as framing it around the jaunty, relaxed narrative of Rocket gives it the feeling of a series of shaggy dog stories and coming-of-age tales (and the film carefully mixes in among the gangsters plenty of reminiscences from Rocket around his teenager upbringing, his first love and his passion for photography). With someone as easy-going as Rocket as our guide, the film never becomes overbearing or depressing but instead as entertaining and engrossing. In a way it’s a shock to remember it features as much killing (including of a child) and mayhem as it does, as well as a world-weary nihilism too it that the odd person may escape the streets, but the general world there will never change.

A staggeringly confident piece of film-making, City of God remains an exciting and compelling piece of cinema.

The Two Popes (2019)

Hopkins and Pryce excel in Fernando Merielles’ witty and thought-provoking The Two Popes

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Cast: Jonathan Pryce (Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Pope Francis), Anthony Hopkins (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI)

Hollywood loves a buddy movie. And what buddy movie could be more off the wall than Two Popes: one a German traditionalist with a reputation for rigid interpretation of church law who reads Latin for fun, the other an easy-going Argentinian reformer with a love of football and tango. So that’s what you get with The Two Popes, a surprisingly funny and engaging film about Papal politics, dashed with a pleasingly even-handed perspective on its two central characters.

In 2012, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) is planning to hand in his resignation as Archbishop of Buenos Aires to Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), now in his seventh year of Pope. Bergoglio feels that he has little left to offer the church, and this own reformist ideas are out of step with the current leadership. He feels his best calling would be to return to a simpler, parish priest life. But Benedict XVI summons him to the Vatican to dissuade him – leading to a series of prolonged heart-to-heart conversations between the two that see a thaw in their relationship, heartfelt confessions from both men on their failings, and Benedict’s revelation that he plans to resign from the Pontificate – and wants Bergoglio to succeed him, as Bergoglio can offer the reform to the church that Benedict cannot.

The Two Popes is a terrific adaptation by Anthony McCarten of his own stage play. It shows us Benedict’s conservative, safety-first policies (towards everything from financial scandals to child abuse scandals) and Bergoglio’s more modern, inclusive church, but largely avoids holding one up as wholly superior to the other, or turning the story into a simple good guy/bad guy conflict. Instead it focuses on showing the faults and positives of both men, and how both men felt a calling and need for their service at different times – and how this loss of calling (something both men suffer from at the start of the film) can be reborn through patience, listening and reflection. Meirelles directs this very theatrical piece sharply, with a keen eye for expanding it into film with a combination of intriguing angles, visual style and confident editing.

Unfolding over the course of several increasingly heartfelt conversations – which progress from awkwardly blunt confrontation, through thawing openness, to something near to a confessional – this is a film that uses the Hollywood convention of a mismatched couple to allow an intriguing exploration of the price and value of faith and the difficulty of duty. Sharp commentary is made on the backgrounds of both men – Benedict growing up in Nazi Germany, the sharp criticism of Bergoglio’s perceived lack of action during the Military Junta coup, which led to his dismissal as head of the Jesuit order in Argentina. Both express guilt, regret and even touches of self-loathing – but both also react to those feelings in the other with patience and support.

It also helps that these conversations around church politics and religious intent are told with plenty of fresh and entertaining jokes. There is always a lot of mileage to be had from seeing people like the Pope delightedly watching trashy TV or failing to recognise either ABBA or the Beatles, while Bergoglio’s homespun openness and willingness to talk with anyone about anything (not to mention his passion for football) throw open no end of comic possibilities from seeing this prince of the Church insist on being treated as just a regular joe.

It also gives loads of opportunities for its two stars, arguably Wales’ leading actors (both highly deserving of their Oscar nods). Hopkins, given his best material in years, is brilliant as Benedict: irascible, imposing, morally certain and firm but also playful just below the surface and a man profoundly aware of his own mistakes and failings. Hopkins delivers the lines with just the right touch of twinkle in his eye.

He also bounces wonderfully off Pryce who is possibly at a career best as Bergoglio. A brilliant physical match for Pope Francis, Pryce’s performance captures perfectly the unaffected humility of the man, but also his intensely sharp personal reflection and the burdens of guilt, as well as the shying away from confrontation that is Bergoglio’s greatest failing. Pryce’s comic timing is impeccable, but he also carries the movie’s heart and soul with affecting skill, pulling off the difficult trick of making a good man a compelling one.

Meirelles’ film is a talky affair – and its construction is a little pat at times, like a very well assembled production line buddy movie and biopic. It never completely escapes the clichés of two-very-different-people-coming-together that is one of its heartbeats, but it does it all so well, with such grace and wit – and two such terrific performances – that it hardly matters. Another big success for Netflix.