Filmmaker John Boorman takes up the South African apartheid problem after its solution, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-Nineties offered amnesty to political criminals, provided they could demonstrate a political motive for their crimes, in exchange for their public confession and confrontation of their victims. Juliette Binoche plays an Afrikaner with a conscience (also with a pleasanter French accent), a poet who is covering the hearings on the radio; and Samuel L. Jackson plays a reporter for The Washington Post, an African-American who, over a century removed from slavery, is covering the hearings with a hotter head and infinite impatience: "How can it be news," he fumes over the placement of his stories on an inside page, "when the victims are black?" Their different approaches to a common concern form the rocky foundation of an intimate relationship; and it's the relationship, in fact, that forms the foundation of the film. Boorman, long interested in the chasms between people, is not one to shy away from the Big Theme -- the plundering of the Amazon jungle in The Emerald Forest, the Burmese bloodbath of the late-Eighties in Beyond Rangoon -- but he has heretofore preferred to couch the theme in a tale of adventure, which, if it doesn't quite muffle the message, at least affords ample opportunity for his voracious camera eye. The mounted animal heads on the walls of an unapologetic torturer (Brendan Gleeson) will not serve as an example of that; still less will the talky, table-and-chairs tribunal scenes. But the photography by Seamus Deasy is handsome all the same, warm and lustrous; and the lovely leisure moment of Binoche and her black sound technician out on the dance floor, in perfect union, grants a fleeting glimpse of utopia; and the partings at the end really do tug at your heart. These people have gone through something together, and at the far side of it they go their separate ways. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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