Fernando Meirelles, the award winning Brazilian director, who gave us “City of God” (2002), has brought to the screen John le Carré’s thrilling novel “The Constant Gardener”. It is set mainly in Kenya and deals with issues of neo-colonialism, the pharmaceutical industry, corruption and murder (the novel was reviewed in Mmegi, 11 July 2003).
Meirelles directs to a script by Jeffrey Caine. Le Carré’s adventure story is cut to the bone, and many scenes trimmed back or by necessity omitted, for example those in Canada.
The movie benefits from the fine eye of Uruguayan cinematographer César Charlone to achieve atmosphere and verisimilitude, but it shifts quickly and you might get left behind if you blink, it is that fast, a leaping mosaic of images. Claire Simpson’s rapid fire editing achieves this too.
The action is augmented by original music by Alberto Iglesias, who also conducts the orchestra. This movie is a Majority World production, though most of the actors are from Britain. It also makes you wonder where the “axis-of-evil” really lies?
It was filmed in Kenya, in Nairobi and the great slum of Kibera (it is being dangerously glamorized), in the north at Lokitaung (on the north-west side of Lake Turkana, though many of the shots that are meant to be there were actually filmed at the soda Lake Magadi south of Nairobi). With permission from the Sudanese Liberation Army, some of the final scenes were filmed in the Sudan.
The movie begins in London, where a young British activist, Tessa (Rachel Weisz, who was awarded “Best Actress” at the Golden Globes 2006) heckles Justin Quayle, a career diplomat in the British Foreign Service (acted with great restraint by Ralph Fiennes at his best). They go to her flat for coffee and soon she proposes, “Take me to Africa with you”. The next shots are at a morgue in Nairobi where Justin, accompanied by a friend from the High Commission, Sandy Woodrow (played by Danny Houston), have gone to identify a body.
This launches Justin on a search for why his wife was killed and what he can do about furthering her concerns. Over the year or more before her death she had her own work, and kept it to herself, as she didn’t want to implicate him. She became pregnant and insisted on delivering in a clinic in Kibera, to demonstrate her commitment and her values.
With an African medical doctor who was a Belgian, Arnold Bluhm (played by Hubert Koundé), a physician with Doctors without Borders, she had been monitoring the impact in Kibera of new TB drug trials by ThreeBees for a major international pharmaceutical giant, KBH. They had observed that there was a high incidence of death caused by Dypraxa. Justin learns, through investigations in London and Berlin that Tessa had wanted to stop the tests and to call for the drug to be redesigned, but this could cause delays of up to three years and result in losses of millions to the companies concerned.
The companies justified their actions by saying “We are not killing people who would not be dead otherwise”.
Tessa’s report was sent by Sandy, who claimed he loved her and whom she trusted, to Sir Bernard Pellegrin (a haughty Bill Nighy) the head of the Foreign Office’s Africa Desk. His response appears to have been not inaction, but collusion in her elimination. As Justin embarks on his search for the truth, he realizes that his revelations will invite retaliation. He elicits some amazing confessions from spooks, High Commission staff, pharmaceutical representatives and the researchers responsible for ThreeBees trials, Dr Lorbeer (Pete Postlethwaite).
Le Carré has not exaggerated facts in his thriller. He claimed in an epilogue to the novel, “As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that by comparison with the reality my story was as tame as a holiday postcard”.
The US Government has issued warnings about fraudulent research in the development and testing of new drugs. Scientists are being bought to produce distorted findings. Suits have arisen against major drug companies in the United States, including Bayer, Pfizer, Wyeth, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb by patients claiming they have been injured by harmful allopathic medicines. Majority World peoples are used as guinea pigs, but who is able to sue in Africa?
Le Carré says his story is about “individual conscience in conflict with corporate greed. It is about the elementary right of doctors to express unbought medical opinions, and their duty to acquaint patients with the risks they believe to be inherent in the treatment they prescribe”.
See the film and see if you agree. It is a far more satisfying movie about Europeans in Africa than Sydney Pollack’s “The Interpreter” (2005), and many others, because it deals with real issues. It deserves to win some Oscars.
“The Constant Gardener” is two hours and nine minutes long. It is rated 13 plus because of violence and nudity. It is in English, Swahili, German and with English subtitles.
sasa_majuma@yahoo.co.uk
