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The time is ripe for a cinematographic adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians", to the extent that this undertaking is possible. Nearly 40 years after its publication, the South African writer's lean but burning allegiance to the denial and defeat of imperialism is doing terribly well in the current political context where the pride of white supremacy is too important. Colombian director Ciro Guerra, on the other hand, is a judicious choice of filmmakers to take on this project, written by Coetzee himself in the first stab of the Nobel laureate: Guerra's film entitled "Embrace the Serpent" "was an anti-colonial odyssey, disconcerting power, with a mastery of Conradian's burrowing metaphor and atmosphere at the edge of madness, worthy of Coetzee's novel.
If the encounter across the continents of these two artists – just for a story unfolding in an indefinite desert nation that could exist on many occasions – does not really bring out the best of one or the other man, this is not totally surprising. : Coetzee's novel, with its measured and internalized voice and its sparse and increasingly devastating narrative, has never been an obvious choice for cinematographic treatment. After a first act frozen and crushed, however, "Waiting for the barbarians" gradually gains in poetry and power, while the main performance of Mark Rylance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives a discreet tone to the proceedings. moral core firm. For art and test distributors, the turning points of Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson will reinforce the limited appeal of a movie that can split critics at a certain price for its commercial prospects.
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The fact of having to visually articulate the novel Somewhereland in Coetzee's novel, particularly atmospheric but geographically elusive, is a difficult obstacle to overcome. The mythical ambiguity of the staging of the novel – which evoked a kind of glass version of South Africa from the time of apartheid at the time of its publication – is a little broken by the clutter of geographical elements in this international coproduction led by Italy. . Frontier territory of an unnamed empire, this small sunny village on which the magistrate (Rylance), also unidentified, applies gently, seems to be in the North African desert (of course, a large part of the shooting is held in Morocco). The indigenous "barbarians" of the title are Mongolian native speakers. We must forget subliminal secondary history before the edification of the world by the film can take root.
In any case, the peaceful administration of the magistrate is turned upside down by a visit from Colonel Joll (Depp), a vindictive and reactionary bureaucrat of the Third Bureau, a branch of the secret services of the Empire, sent to investigate on the possibility of an attack by natives. forces. The magistrate sees no risk if he continues to live passively; The idea of Joll's proactive defense, on the other hand, is to lead a theoretical expedition into the desert, then return with a group of "barbarians" in captivity to imprison and torture her. When Joll and his companions go as summarily as they approached, the magistrate must deal with the fallout of vicious war crimes in which he had no voice, although he did not go to court. he is scarcely spared accusations of colonial complicity – let alone when he falls in love with an abused, half-blind native woman (who deeply affects Gana Bayarsaikhan) and finds herself torn between her release and her property. .
It is a complex, richly allusive material, teeming with hypocrisy and thorny political conflict, interspersed with a tacit emotion of loneliness and guilty guilt – although only some of these subtleties emerge in the treatment of the screen deliberately dumb and deliberate of Guerra. The adaptation of Coetzee is particularly verbose and punctuated at first, translating a little too the sodic narration of the novel into a declamatory dialogue on the nose – for which Guerra, in his first project in English, does not present much 39, an ear. Rylance, who is never the bad man to play if you have compromising integrity and compromised integrity, ends up finding the rhythm; Depp, often hidden behind steampunk style sunglasses, is needed to work in a narrower ice beach.
Yet, the film, divided into four seasonal chapters, takes a breather when the bureaucratic issues are settled and the inner life of the magistrate is put in the foreground. Later, a restorative journey into the ruthless desert, followed by the magistrate's reluctant lover, finds Guerra much more in his element, largely avoiding dialogue for the gesture and the delusional environmental threat: working in a widescreen lush, warm to the touch, veteran Director of photography, Chris Menges, captures long human shadows on undulating caramel dunes in more commented compositions – must the empire be imposed in all landscapes? – that a lot of drier verbiage of the film.
From now on, "Waiting for the Barbarians" is gradually generating a serious and violent anger against the invading oppressive systems that are proving disturbing and enraged, while the making of Guerra's film becomes wiser. As Joll and the Third Bureau return with vicious reinforcements – including Pattinson, a spooky one – a host of grotesque violations of the human being are vividly brought to the fore, while, in the background, books gradually disappear. shelves without notice or comments. (After all, there is no place for the intellect in white supremacy.) Yet, this flawed film slowly casts its words for a more and more moving effect, towards a final that looks into most of the colonial carnage in an astonished silence, while the despots are disarmed, the soldiers become scarecrows. , and a last teasing shot – in the most provocative break of the film with the text of Coetzee – indicates new cycles of conflict.
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