Best of the week promotes religious values

By Alan Charlton

It has become almost expected that the best movie release each week is a documentary. It is unusual this week that the documentary is also an assertion of religious values.

SCARED SACRED, a movie which comes out of British Columbia, focuses on the horrors inflicted by humans on humans. The director and writer, a man going by the unlikely name of Velcrow Ripper, visits sites of some of the worst atrocities of the last 60 years: Bhopal, Palestine, Bosnia, Palestine, Hiroshima, New York. Each of them represents a milestone on the dreadful path of human suffering.

As he journeys along that road, Ripper turns his camera on some of the most victimized. There are people who have lost freedom; there are people who have lost family members, many of them young children; there are people who have lost everything they hold dear.

What at first seems to be a gratuitous and voyeuristic look at human misery, however, gradually becomes a realization that even in the worst experiences, in the most horrendous of events, human beings have the capacity not only to survive, but to salvage from their tragedies a sense of hope and a realization that, as the title suggests, through suffering one can arrive at a deeper appreciation of the sacred.

For many of the survivors the choice was clear: either to lose oneself in bitterness and anger or to choose to turn the horror into a positive experience.

Sometime the result is ostensibly secular, as when a couple who were virtually imprisoned in their home in Bosnia for many months turn the wreckage around them into art and a statement of hope.

Sometimes the result is clearly religious, as when two couples, one Jewish and one Palestinian, both of whom have lost children in the ethnic conflict which surrounds them, seek to establish a peaceful end to the violence and to put into practice their overlapping religious belief that goodness is superior to evil.

The result is a film which is truly thought-provoking and unusual. Its necessary hand-held camera approach and rather fortuitous discoveries do not make for a neatly seamed and polished film. However, these very characteristics give it an immediacy and sense of truth which makes the film even more compelling.

Perhaps the message of the film is that only the shocking tragedy of personal loss and suffering can shake us out of the complacency with which we lead our comfortable and generally calm lives, but as long as we are spared such terrors ourselves, we may meanwhile learn much from SCARED SACRED, a truly haunting reminder of the holy truths which we too often ignore.

The B.C. rating is PG. Warning: violence, coarse language.

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Though rather less unconventional, THE CONSTANT GARDENER is still certainly rather more than the run-of-the-mill thriller. Based on a novel by John le Carre, it is, as one might expect, intelligently plotted and mercifully free from the unrealistic overstatement that generally one expects of commercial thrillers.

We meet a minor diplomat who falls in love with a woman he meets in London and whom he marries before taking up a post in Africa.

Unknown to him, his wife, an idealistic social activist, is conducting an investigation into the distribution of a drug to thousands of people, a drug which has not been adequately tested and which has caused the death of many. Very early in the film, the woman is murdered.

The rest of the film is largely taken up with the protagonist’s investigation of the murder of his wife.

While there are some implausibilities in the plot and while it takes a somewhat predictable path on its way to a generally predictable but nonetheless satisfactory climax, the film works well on a number of levels.

First of all, it has a very literate script, one which presents situations in a clear and intelligible fashion. Then, too, the acting is superb. In particular the two leading actors, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, beautifully convey the loveliness of two people deeply in love. Their performances are subtle, engaging and broad in scope.

Moreover, despite the fact that we have to sit through yet another gratuitous scene of love-making, the fact that the romance resonates as real and convincing gives this thriller a depth that is usually lacking in such films.

In addition to this, the view that it gives us of the treatment of Africa by the Western world is both salutary and timely; the film is certainly both relevant and arresting as socio-political commentary.

Finally, director Fernando Meirelles has deftly directed the film so that the violence is neither indulgent nor gratuitous, while his ability to assist his actors in conveying subtle emotion in telling close-up is nothing short of brilliant. Indeed, the only flaw in the film is that it is a trifle too long and could have done with some further editing.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER, despite its sometimes negative content, in a year in which we have been exposed to much that is formulaic and unoriginal, remains one of the best forays into the thriller realm and one of the best films of the year.

Because of brief rear and partial nudity, scattered profanity, rough language and crude expressions, a restrained premarital bedroom scene, quick blurry shots of violence including lynching, and a gruesome description of death, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III – adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R - restricted. The B.C. rating is 14A. Warning: violence, coarse language.