BrokenProjector.com

The Handheld Realism of ‘The Constant Gardener’

“So who has got away with murder? Not, of course, the British government. They merely covered up, as one does, the offensive corpses. Though not literally. That was done by person or persons unknown. So who has committed murder? Not, of course, the highly respectable firm of KDH Pharmaceutical, which has enjoyed record profits this quarter… and has now licensed ZimbaMed of Harare…. to continue testing Dypraxa in Africa. No, there are no murders in Africa. Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization, benefits we can afford so easily… because those lives were bought so cheaply.”

-closing lines from ‘The Constant Gardener’ (2005)

Ever since the conception of the motion pictures, the element of realism has been a topic of constant debate. Over the various decades and evolutionary periods of cinema, filmmakers have twisted the fabric of reality to actually bring about realism and at the same time stray far away from it. Not taking the field of documentary cinema into consideration, the concept of realism in cinema can only reach so far when it comes to depicting real people, real situations and telling real stories.

The Constant Gardener is a powerful tale of love set in the sun-dried terrains of Kenya. The film deals with the issues of international politics, unethical breach of human rights and ugly conspiracy. At the heart, the film still functions as a bonafide love story with love being the motivation for protagonist Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) to uncover the ugly conspiracy behind the death of his deceased wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz).

Fernando Meirelles, the visionary behind the film does a fantastic job adapting the story from the groundbreaking novel of the same name by John le Carré. The cinematography of the film has a unique documentary feel to it which further adds to the realism of the events taking place. César Charlone, the Director of Photography for the film brings about a very original look to the photography by shooting the entire film hand-held. In fact, Ralph Fiennes does some of the hand-held pov shots for his character Justin Quayle. The colour palette for the film is as separated as it is united. The cinematography in Africa is rich in colours with a prominent emphasis on teals and greens. The shot of the lake where both Tessa and Justin meet their end is just admirable with the jade water set against the honey-coloured sunset tied together by countless flights of birds and the final enlightenment in Justin’s eyes. The segments of the film that are set in Britain and Amsterdam are drenched in cold, colourless blue casts signifying the coldness and the loneliness felt by Justin upon returning to his home land and still being unable to reach ‘home’. Indeed, he aptly proclaims that his home was his wife Tessa.

Apart from the levels of realism being constructed for the film in terms of location shooting and inclusion of real African people, the story also addresses a lot of issues that are real and true. Though the source for the story comes from a reality-inspired work of fiction, the film puts forward a formidable effort in staying true to the issues being addressed in both the story and the reality that inspired it.

In the film, western pharmaceutical giant KDH forms a marriage with a corporation called Three Bees based in Kenya to carry out testing on humans for the development of an experimental new drug named Dypraxa. There is a global tuberculosis epidemic coming and KDH intends to dominate the pharmaceutical market with this wonder-drug. But things take an ugly turn when Dypraxa turns up with a lethal side-effect which results in the death of several Kenyan human ‘guinea pigs’. KDH continues to develop the drug and Three Bees continues to test the drug through Informed Consent of the unsuspecting villagers. Tessa Quayle, human rights activist and the wife of British Diplomat Justin Quayle discovers this operation and is put to silence in the process of uncovering it.

Justin Quayle, oblivious of these events and dissatisfied with the half-baked answers to the reason behind his wife’s death embarks on a mission to learn the truth. His transformation from a mild-mannered, complacent British Diplomat to a person who gives a damn and understands the value of a human life is inspiring and so very heart-breakingly real. The film finds a proper balance in the parallel subjects of exploitation of human rights and the emotional love story of Justin and Tessa Quayle, each incomplete without the other.

Fernando Mierelles succeeds in segregating the two powerful subjects and juxtaposing them in a way they appear almost inseperable. The wide landscape of Africa and the peoples inhabit the screen in a very detached manner, almost as if the camera is another person standing there with those people. On the other end of the spectrum we have the intimate love scenes between Justin and Tessa, where you almost never see both of them at the same time, which takes away the presence of another person with them and instead the camera becomes the gaze of the two lovers shifting back and forth between them.

Sonia Shah puts forward a brilliant subject in her article ‘The Constant Gardener’: What the movie missed. Shah is the author of the best-selling book The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients. Shah argues that the film missed out on bringing out deeper issues related to the subjects of human rights violations in terms of drug testing in developing nations and the concept of Informed Consent. Shah herself has spent a large amount of time in her career as an Investigative Journalist, studying the outsourcing of drug testing to developing countries like Africa, India and parts of South America by developed nations. In her article Shah states:

“But challenging these practices is not nearly as black-and-white as this film would have it. Tessa Quayle, the martyred activist, stands up to yell “bullshit” at public lectures, shaking her lovely dark mane while she’s at it. At cocktail parties, she loudly embarrasses the health minister, who marches off in a huff. Good stuff, but the reality is that uncompromising activists–even if they look like Rachel Weisz–rarely enjoy this kind of privileged access to power so effortlessly. Tessa has it too good and too bad, too. She ends up paying with her life for her exposure of the botched trial; in real life, bad drugs and unethical research practices often continue unhindered despite mountains of data and reports detailing their defects.”

Shah has a very important point here. For all the realism the film offers, it does fail to deliver a realistic progress of the investigation. Shah is right in saying that it takes more than just crumpled pieces of paper from the official dustbin of a political body to put up the goliaths against the wall. But perhaps, there is only so much realism a film can offer before it turns into a full-blown documentary.

This is why when we see the stars in cinema, they look so charismatic and so god-like. The shallow depth of field, the immaculate colour correction and the expensive film stock all contribute in taking cinema far away from our real lives just to make sure that our undivided attention stays on the large rectangle of projected light for those 90 plus minutes or so.

It is simply a work of irony that a medium of art which spends so much of its resources in trying to make a product so unreal should give so much of a damn to wear its realism on its chest. I feel ‘The Constant Gardener’ provides an original mix of this irony without crossing over into becoming too concerned with real life or tread into the parallel universe of Hollywood cinema that fails to go beyond the borders of Florida.

Technorati Tags: Dypraxa, Africa, realism, The Constant Gardener, Kenya, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Fernando Meirelles, John le Carré, César Charlone, human rights, violations, drug testing, developing nations, Informed Consent