15, 128mins
The brilliant young Brazilian Fernando Meirelles made a huge splash in 2002 with City of God, a hypnotic account of gun crime among homeless children in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The magic of that film was rooted in its alarming authenticity. The director’s latest exposé, The Constant Gardener — about corporate drug abuse in Africa — is another close encounter with the hair-raising truth. Meirelles has gutted John le Carré’s awkward novel and produced the hottest political thriller of the year.
The film opens in Kenya with the rape and murder of a British diplomat’s wife, Tessa. It gradually spirals into a gripping quest by her husband, Justin (Ralph Fiennes), to find out why. All the evidence points to adultery and a crime of passion. But Tessa’s campaign to topple a sinister pharmaceutical company that is testing drugs on unsuspecting locals offers a far more choice selection of worms.
Fiennes has rarely been this magnetic on the big screen. His lowly diplomat is beset by grief and a Foreign Office that wants to sweep the whole beastly affair under the carpet. You can sense the anger underpinning Meirelles’s timely film. The West’s lopsided relationship with Africa has never been more relevant. The drama is a fictional heartbeat short of the documentary truth. The stakes are unspeakably high. Justin’s suicidal determination to find his wife’s killers is driven as much by his need to know if his wife was loyal to him as it is by sheer principle. The film sifts the clues to their relationship, and the murder itself, in a series of startling flashbacks.
What makes Justin and Tessa click proves as enthralling as the political twists that threaten to bury them. Danny Huston is wonderful as Justin’s sweaty boss who tries to bed Tessa behind his back. And Bill Nighy is fabulously insincere as the British government minister who tries to hang Tessa’s murder on an infatuated African doctor.
Advertisement
“But Albert is homosexual,” says Justin. “Well, I’ve known one or two savage queens in my time,” drawls Nighy without skipping a beat.
Meirelles pieces the film together like a jigsaw puzzle. The fiendish plot slithers around tense scenes with frightened witnesses in the African bush, slippery conversations with officials in London and late-night encounters with thugs in Berlin. It’s a love story covered in bruises.