STEVE AYORINDE reviews how the Oscar-winning director, Gavin Hood, returned to the 32nd edition of the Toronto International Film Festival with another hit film, but this time leaving the South African townships for mainstream Hollywood
With a stand at the Sales and Industry section and two films (well Gavin Hood has a way of being directly linked to South Africa) in the theatres, South Africa presented a formidable force at the last Toronto film festival, 2007, perhaps far more than any other African country. The World Unseen, an adaptation of Shamim Sarif's award-winning novel had its world premiere at the popular North American festival. But while this film about the customs and societal roles of men and women and the intricacies of interracial relationships during the apartheid regime was the real South African entry, with its huge banner conspicuously displayed at the South African booth, the film that, arguably, brought greater attention to the country was Gavin Hood's superb political thriller on America's war on terror, Rendition.
Hood's acclaimed film Tsotsi, had first won the People's Choice Award at the same Toronto film festival in 2005 before winning the Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. By its success, Tsotsi can be considered to have gone global, but with Rendition, Hood has made a confident move to the Hollywood mainstream, choosing a script in English with a theme that is contemporaneous and using heavyweight Hollywood actors such as Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep and Jake Gyllenhaal.
The film adds to Hood's profile as a director with the ability to illuminate a tricky situation through a very personal and emotive human story. With the hazy complexities of the war on terror providing the backdrop for the film, Rendition is about the exposition of the United States policy of extraordinary rendition and the cycle of violence that demands violent retaliations. Hood uses the fictional tale of an innocent Egyptian-American Chemical Engineer, Anwar El Ibrahim, (Omar Metwally) who is curiously linked to the suicide bombing that kills 19 people, including one American CIA boss, Corine Whitman (Streep) in Morocco. Commencing from Cape Town, the disappearance of the man on the flight from South Africa to Washington leads his pregnant wife, Isabella (Witherspoon), to try to track her husband down. Her path crosses that of a CIA analyst, Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal), who had narrowly escaped the bombing incident, and had witnessed the interrogation and torture of her husband at a secret detention facility outside the US. The sheer drama and suspence in the series of scenes leading to the climax provides a ray of hope upon which the film's emotions berthed. Meanwhile, the CIA analyst is forced to question the ethics of his assignments as he becomes a party to a political establishment that is determined to adopt an eye-for-an-eye ideology.
Although it draws parallels to the real life events surrounding Maher Arar, a Canadian who was subjected to the US policy of "extra ordinary rendition" in 2002, the film does not appear to state any claim of being based on the story.
However, Hood's noticeable strength in human drama laced with sharp, smart photography is also the hallmark of this film. He had shown in Tsotsi how well a director could discard a chunk of materials from the book in which the screenplay was adapted, and still end up extolling the universal themes of redemption and forgiveness, as well as personal responsibility. In Rendition, similarly, he manages to keep to this universal cinematic tenets; interestingly keeping the film away from extreme postulations, even if the ending seems to have been accorded an upbeat treatment than the situation merits.
But here is a film that clearly refrains from preaching to the audience, and with cinematic maturity and string of strong performances from the lead actors, Rendition's copious human drama and provocative political undertone are bound to be gripping to varied audiences when it hits the global cinema on October 19; and, perhaps, ultimately ensure Hood's successful cross-over to the mainstream.
Steve Ayorinde
