Sometimes the importance of a terrible event clouds our sympathy for those involved. I suppose it's easier to say "We express our sympathies to those affected", but when all these people are simply faces on a television set we can do nothing more than lump them together as a collective body. "London River" attempts to break that way of thinking with regards to the 2005 suicide bombings that took place throughout the public transport system which killed dozens and wounded hundreds.
Our protagonists are two parents on a search to find their missing children whom they fear could have been hurt in the terrorist attacks. The two people have never met, know nothing about each other and under normal circumstances never would meet. Their lives become intertwined through a bout of national grief and possible tragedy and offers us a stark, if not completely novel or nuanced, image of humanism conquering fear.
Brenda Blethyn plays Elisabeth, a gruff, devout Protestant and a farmer in Guernsey. Knowing her university-age daughter is in London, seeing the attacks on the telly causes her to panic and when she receives no reply on the phone from her daughter, Elisabeth packs up to go find her. She arrives at her daughter's apartment in the middle of what I could only describe as the Middle Eastern District. It probably has a better, more politically correct name, but I'm ignorant so we'll leave it as that.
The film rings of similar 9/11 themes that cropped up everywhere in the US following their own attacks. Guernsey does not strike me as the kind of place that has many Muslims just as England generally has no religion to speak of. This oddity, a member of an old and dying parish, is thrown suddenly in amongst people that she fears and misunderstands. Blethyn's performance is hard and powerful, timid and confused. There is not much more for her to do than worry, speculate and mistrust, but she is able to pull out the tiny fragments of a heavily burdened woman to create a rich and damaged character.
If Blethyn is the performance, Sotiqui Kouyate is the presence. He is the second parent, Ousmane, a frail, old African immigrant working as a conservationist in France. He left his family for Paris 15 years prior and hasn't seen his son since the boy was six. However, upon hearing of the attacks the boy's mother requested that Ousmane find him and bring him home. Happenstance, or possibly more, brings him to the same neighborhood as Elisabeth and as much as the two try to fight it their paths eventually intertwine.
Blethyn does all of the "acting" and she is wonderful at it, but Kouyate is wonderful at simply being. He doesn't raise his voice, he never moves more than necessary, he never once performs, but the moment when he finally sees a photograph of his adult son the look in his eyes, though it barely changes, eclipses the sun. Every blink, every breath, every measured step speaks volumes of Ousmane's life and the trials he has faced. These two characters played by two very different actors with styles even more varying is the centerpiece of this film.
The rest of the story is rather straightforward. The two must meet, but because of the travesty and because Ousmane is Muslim their is hostility. In the end, however, there must be peace and we know this. It would be cruel and ignorant to make a movie where intolerance triumphs, but that simple truth also makes the film somewhat irrelevant. Is it necessary to have another film about "love thy neighbor", especially if we learn nothing more about the events at hand?
Despite the film's worn out messages, it is our two leads and their immense gifts that makes this film interesting. I've said enough about it and won't say more, but Kouyate's eyes and Blethyn's eyebrows say everything about this movie that I can't.
2.5/4
No comments:
Post a Comment