Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Kounde
Director: Fernando Meirelles
The film: 'It's like it's a marriage of convenience and all it produces is dead offspring,' rages the fiery activist Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener, shortly after her child with subservient diplomat Justin dies at birth. As the film unfurls, however, her seemingly ambiguous statement no longer seems directed at the partner who shares her bed but not her fire for social justice. Instead, it's an accusation aimed at the cynical collaboration between multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers and local drug distributors, which results in deadly medical experiments on an impoverished African population.
The way Tessa's statement could be interpreted in more ways than one embodies the brilliance of this film adaptation of John le Carre's thriller. A conspiracy-driven thriller that seeks to indict the bottomless greed of Big Pharma, The Constant Gardener is also an epic romance, unleashed after Tessa was killed and Justin was left with nothing but a dogged determination to continue his wife's attempts to expose the shady deals that put the Kenyan masses at the mercy of malicious capitalists.
Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz (above) deliver career-defining performances, but the success of the film is largely due to director Fernando Meirelles. Under his aegis, le Carre's conspiracy is transformed from an archetypal British thriller into an imposing tale about the unremitting shadow western imperialism casts on former colonies. Bringing in the grittiness that marks City of God, his brutal ode to the favelas in Rio, Meirelles portrays - sympathetically rather than exotically - the desolution of life in the Kenyan slums, compared with the affluence the expatriates enjoy in their just-like-home havens.
Being someone emerging outside the Anglo-American filmmaking tradition, Meirelles manages to examine his subject matter in a refreshing light: Cesar Charlone's cinematography, which places much emphasis on documentary-type, non-static movements, gives the film a sense of urgency. Life in the bustling Kenyan slums of Kibera is conveyed through scenes of warm colour tones, while Nairobi's British High Commission and the hallowed corridors of power in London are drained of colour, a shade of greyish green, an indictment of the sang-froid that permeates these establishments.