Rachid Bouchareb (2009)

A middle-aged woman and an elderly man travel to London in the days after 7/7 to look for their missing children – her daughter, his son.  Elisabeth Sommers is a widow whose husband was in the navy and died in the Falklands War.  She runs a small farm in Guernsey.  Ousmane is a North African – a forester who emigrated to France, leaving his wife and young son behind, fifteen years ago.  She’s a Christian (‘a Protestant – more or less’), he’s a Muslim.  It turns out that Elisabeth’s daughter Jane and Ousmane’s son Ali were a couple, sharing her small rented flat on Blackstock Road and, to Elisabeth’s greater consternation, taking Arabic classes together.  In other words, the screenplay, which Rachid Bouchareb wrote with Olivier Lorelle, is schematic and not especially inventive.  Yet London River is almost perfectly realised, thanks to Bouchareb’s assured and sensitive direction, and the wonderful performances of Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyaté as the two principals.

Bouchareb makes London in July 2005 seem both recognisable and freshly imagined (perhaps this is a combination that only a perceptive outsider can bring off).  He never forces the material.  He understands that it’s inherently dramatic and doesn’t need to be mined for drama.  Desperate people posting photographs of the missing are familiar from news coverage of the aftermath to 7/7.  Here, we also watch them looking down lists of patients on hospital notice boards and, worst of all, queuing to identify corpses.  By working these terrible images into the texture of the film rather than pushing them at the audience, Bouchareb makes them all the more powerful.  Away from London, the opening and closing sequences in Guernsey and France are no less supple and effective, as Elisabeth and Ousmane are introduced in their usual habitats and eventually return to them.   The actors in smaller roles all play at just the right level – their characterisations are clear but there’s a lack of adornment that gives the people they’re playing a documentary realness.  Sotigui Kouyaté, who died a few months after London River was completed, is an extraordinary camera subject.  It’s apt that Ousmane works with trees (dying elms in particular).  There’s an arboreal quality to Kouyaté’s sinewy thinness and to his face, which suggests a longevity well beyond his actual years (he was seventy-three when he died).   His acting, although it’s emotionally expressive and precise, doesn’t seem like acting at all.  He just is.

This makes Kouyaté the polar opposite of his co-star as a performer but they complement each other triumphantly.  London River features by far the finest acting I’ve seen from Brenda Blethyn.   From the start, she creates a remarkably complete character and her native humour and eccentricity animate the hushed but (of course) ominous atmosphere of the scenes in Guernsey.  Elisabeth’s dotty personality and attitude towards her daughter – loving, anxious, and at first irritated rather than alarmed when Jane doesn’t return the messages left on her mobile – register immediately.  It’s this that makes the scenes in London so affecting.  Blethyn conveys piercingly the experience of a woman in a place she doesn’t know and which she finds increasingly baffling.  That place is both a hugely expansive physical location and a state of mind similarly beyond Elisabeth’s usual range of thoughts and feelings.   In Secrets & Lies, Blethyn did too much acting:  in the climax to the film, it was as if she’d exhausted herself – at that point something more truthful emerged and the effect was very touching.   In London River Rachid Bouchareb has enabled Blethyn to work inwards and she’s consistently moving.

The script makes a miscalculation so large that the film takes a knock from which it struggles to recover, although eventually it just about does.  Elisabeth and Ousmane learn from a travel agent that Jane and Ali bought tickets to travel on Eurostar on the 12:30 train from Waterloo on 7/7.  They – and Elisabeth especially – are euphoric at this news.  It means the young couple must have set out from home after the three explosions on the tube, that they’re now enjoying a holiday together in France.   Of course you believe that their parents would grasp at any hopeful news.  What you can’t believe is that doubts and questions don’t begin to set in – in either of their minds.   Jane and Ali couldn’t have been on the tube trains that were bombed but it was an hour later that the bus exploded in Tavistock Square.  Even if she is abroad, why isn’t Jane answering her calls?  (She and Elisabeth normally communicate with each other on the phone between London and the Channel Islands.)   The clumsy conventionality of the screenplay is badly exposed at this stage but is unignorable:  the protagonists have to go through the agony of false hope in order to give extra impetus to the trauma of the bad news they receive next morning.   It’s because this manipulative formula is unworthy of London River that it detracts from it so much.   The closing scenes are strong, though.  I think the final shots of the film, as Elisabeth, back on the farm in Guernsey, bangs a spade into the earth repeatedly and furiously, will stay with me.

20 July 2012