PressEthic

Commenting on the three Emmy Awards given to the TV film, "The Girl in the Café", Heather Haines remarked:

I couldn't help but wonder…is Hollywood starting to think more globally and less parochially? With Clooney, Pitt, and Jolie now trekking the globe, are these topics--previously deemed "unsexy"--now winning over the hearts and minds of Tinseltown?

The film, written by Richard Curtis (think Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones and Love Actually), tells the story of a British civil servant working at the 2005 G8 summit. He meets a girl in a café and decides to take her along to the summit with him. She is of course a fiesty and passionate individual who (surprise, surprise) challenges the status quo, refusing to adhere to the G8's bureacracy, politics and jargon in its approach to achieving the United Nation's Millenium Development Goals.

Sound familiar? It did to me, although the parallel did not warm my heart as much as it did that of Heather Haines:

For my money, it’s heartening to see cinematic depictions of women challenging a complacent system (think Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardner) and more rewarding still to see mainstream Hollywood take up their cause.

Indeed, The Constant Gardener was the first thing that came to my head when I first read about The Girl in the Café. Based on the book by John le Carré, the film The Constant Gardener was deservedly lauded this year for revealing the bad doings of pharmaceutical companies in contemporary Africa, a subject that has hitherto hardly been considered in mainstream fictional media. Like the heroine of the The Girl in the Café, Weisz's character, Tessa Quayle, is similarly emotional and passionate in her determination to act to stop international injustices.

When I saw the film, however, it was not the depiction of women challenging the system that stood out to me (hardly a new heroic formula); indeed, as I walked out of the cinema, one glaring question remained unanswered: where was contemporary Africa in the film?

The African country shown in the story is Kenya, and a significant part of the action takes place in Nairobi, a city i happen to be familiar with, having visited it for the past three summers. The Nairobi I know is a diverse city, with suburbs and slums, skyscraper-like office buildings and roadside vegetable stands, motorways and mud roads. The Nairobi in the film, however, is remarkably polarised: we follow Tessa into the shock of the open-sewered Kibera slums, and then back to her colonial-style home, complete with greenhouse and lush lawns; the Kenyans we see her interact with are either corrupt officials or powerless poor mothers and children subject to the will of pharmaceutical companies. Only Arnold Bluhm, a local doctor who encourages and informs Tessa's activism (and turns out to be gay: the get-out clause for why he never seduces the heroine, I suppose) hints at the existence of a modern and educated Kenyan population.

The severity of this misrepresentation is only heightened by the lengths to which the film goes to represent Europe, especially London, as it is today: the decor, the public transport, even the hi-tech media culture (web cameras play a significant role in the narrative) is all very 2004.

Sadly, however, Kenya appears to be stuck in the early twentieth century. Where were the business men and women commuting to work? Where were the mothers and fathers doing the school run in the car? Where were the students on their way to university? Where was the Nairobi that I knew? HAD NOONE ELSE NOTICED?

Well, it would seem that they had: back in January, John Kariuki wrote an informed and balanced piece for one of the Kenyan national newspapers, The Nation: The Kenyan take on The Constant Gardener. The article raises an interesting question:

Says Charlie Simpson of Film Studios: "Just like in the (source) book by British author, John Le Carré, the film is very unfair to Kenya and portrays it in [a] very bad light.

As far as he is concerned, the novel from which the movie is adapted is an insult to Kenyan hospitality. Simpson recalls that the author came here to look for a background to his story, but was, in essence, only in search of a dark canvas on which to tarnish the country.

The implication is that both Kariuki and Simpson are disappointed in Le Carré for not having represented Kenya as he saw it; indignant even that the novelist took the creative license to depict only specific aspects of the country in order to create the "dark canvas" he needed for his dark thriller. But doesn't such criticism suppose the novelist to be a journalist, with an ethical responsibility to write truth not fiction? On the other hand, in writing a novel about the pharmaceutical industry in Africa today, did Le Carré choose to occupy a role somewhere between that of the novelist and that of the journalist, representing something between fiction and non-fiction?

I am sure that neither Le Carré, nor Jeffrey Caine (the film's screenwriter) would claim that they were journalists; however, in writing a novel and creating a film about such a contemporary and controversial issue, they are inevitably involved in the journalistic process of informing the public. What I wonder is whether these two writers researched this issue in order to raise consciousness, or in order to create a new and original setting for a romantic, tragic thriller. The prioritisation of the central romantic narrative, the crass simplification of "reality" in Kenya and the lack of consideration for its people imply, sadly, that the latter is true. The result, I believe, is that the Western public perception of Kenya (and arguably Africa) is misinformed as much as it is informed. Or, as Kariuki puts it, Kenya is left "more wronged than helped". Nevertheless, such criticism was barely visible as The Constant Gardener won award after award, including an Oscar, a Golden Globen and a BAFTA.

So in answer to Haines's question of whether development issues are becoming less "unsexy" and "winning the hearts and minds of Tinseltown": yes, they apparently are. In answer to her subsequent question "Can Hollywood save us?", the answer is no (with a caveat). Films like The Constant Gardener and The Girl in the Café raise awareness only superficially; moreover, they romanticise the development sphere, merely instrumentalising it as a new setting for love stories we've seen so many times before. Making development issues sexy is not the path to solving the world's problems.

The caveat would be that the film industry (not mainstream Hollywood), can and has recently played an important role in contributing to increased awareness regarding controversial issues - think Syriana and Crash. For me, these two films had a much more ethical approach to the ethically-ambiguous role of fictionalising contemporary issues. Both films refused to prioritise the conventional and simplistic hero-heroine narrative: their multiple-narrative structures didn't allow the audience to get involved with one or two characters alone, but rather encouraged an appreciation of the overall complexity of the key issues; their marketing lines were not "Love cant change whats wrong in the world. But its a start.", rather, these films were truer to their subject matter precisely because they did not simplify it to make it "sexy".

Oh, and one other thing: the showing I saw of The Constant Gardener was preceded by a short film promoting the United Nation's World Food Programme . It involved that beautiful English rose, Weisz (one of the WFP's "celebrity partners"), prancing among sand dunes on an idyllic beach, dressed elegantly in Gap or Banana Republic, and, yes, you guessed it: leading a group of little black children by the hands. What a metaphor. Did noone notice that either?

For a brilliant satire on how "fashionable" the development sector has become, see Todd Moss's piece: So Many Fabulous Ways to Save Africa!