WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (2020)
Recently I was wondering whether watching a film with subtitles gives it an extra caché because of the exoticism of watching something foreign. That Waiting For The Barbarians, director Ciro Guerra's first film in the English language, is such a slow dull and largely unbelievable exercise in colonial criticism seems to back up that theory.
He is currently most known as the director of Embrace of The Serpent (2015) a strikingly stylised black and white film that won several awards and still sticks in the memory. Its themes also resolved around the oppressive nature of colonialism. And it was mesmerising.
Here, in a story based on the book by J.M. Coetzee which explores similar themes, we find ourselves in an isolated fort in the dessert. A colonial outpost. French perhaps. In charge is Mark Rylance's very decent magistrate who has forged a good relationships with the locals and seems to have a genuine interest in the area and its well-being.
Enter Depp's unforgiving and oppressive Colonel, out to stamp out imagined insurgencies. Soon things are getting fraught and he is torturing locals in a hunt for his mythical villains. Eventually his sights turn towards the magistrate. Things continue to go downhill as various the approaches and contradictions of colonialisation are examined.
Now that all sound okay. The problem is that it both happens at a glacial pace and that it isn't either especially involving or novel. This is perhaps where subtitles might have made things seem exotic and interestingly foreign. But Rylance's decency in the face of overwhelming unpleasantness is so extreme as to be unbelievable. It limps along.
And I guess I should mention Robert Pattinson - playing Depp's 2IC - since he seems to be in every second film I see these days, much as Michael Fassbender was a couple of years back. I have no idea what inspired Pattinson to take this role. I can only assume he really wanted to work with either the director or Johnny Depp since he serves pretty much no function either as a character or plot device.
Sorry, the best I can say here is that the scenery and cinematography are both very good looking.
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