By Dimitri
Keramitas
The annual
Human Rights Film Festival in Paris normally features documentaries depicting
rights violations, crises, and problems around the globe. This year’s program
included films about pollution-exchange fraud in Denmark (The Carbon Crooks),
water shortages in Ethiopia (The Well), the exploitation of agricultural
workers in India (Cotton Dreams) and adolescent homelessness in the United
States (The Homestretch).
 |
| L'Epreuve: taking photos through it all. |
But for the
first time it also included a fiction feature dealing with a topical subject:
the role of photojournalists in conflict zones in Africa and Central Asia, and
their responsibilities not only to their profession and subjects, but also to
their families.
L’Epreuve
(English title: 1000 Times Good Night) was made by Erik Poppe, a Norwegian
photojournalist directing his first feature, and stars French actress Juliette
Binoche. The “pre-premiere” in a Paris Left Bank cinema in April was followed
by a discussion with Hubert Picard, a veteran French photographer (he preferred
this term to photojournalist). It sometimes turned into rancorous debate that,
like the film itself, called into question easy assumptions about truth and
fiction.
Binoche plays
photojournalist Rebecca. She has a loving family in Ireland, a marine biologist
husband and two young daughters. She could easily have a cozy, privileged
domestic life but her profession takes her into conflict areas where she
records grisly events and puts her own life in danger.
At the
beginning of the film we see her in Afghanistan, where she has seemingly
embedded - not with US troops but with Taliban guerrillas. She follows a
woman’s elaborate preparation to become a suicide bomber, and even the carrying
out of her mission in a dusty village.
 |
| The poster for the film. |
Rebecca has a
burst of conscience at the moment the bomb detonates, yelling out warnings and
being severely injured herself. Most of the film is about her return home and
convalescence, her questioning her vocation, and most of all her tortured
relationship with her spouse Marcus and daughter Steph. To try to repair her
relationship with Steph, Rebecca takes her daughter to Kenya to visit a
supposedly peaceful refugee camp.
The first
issue raised by L’Epreuve is how genuine a film about human rights can be when
it stars a celebrity actress, one who’s an Oscar winner and has modelled in
glamorous photo shoots. Binoche takes the obvious route of other actresses,
such as Jessica Lange and Charlize Theron, who have taken on difficult roles: she
makes herself seem as plain and middle-aged as possible. This is mostly
successful, especially as Binoche really is of a certain age, and also adopts
an understated acting style. In L’Epreuve the other actors, notably Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau as the husband, and Lauryn Canny as Steph, more than hold their
own, so that we believe in the characters as characters, not as roles or star
turns.
A second
issue is less successfully resolved, and that has to do with the directing.
Taking on his first directing job, Poppe goes overboard in ways typical of
neophyte filmmakers. The scenes that take place in Kenya have a well-scrubbed
National Geographic sheen, while those in Ireland are often self-consciously
gorgeous. The images make the film enjoyable, but they also shout “This is a
film”, and more precisely “This is a first film”, distracting us from the
subject.
A third issue
concerns the production, and the subsidies the film presumably received from
Irish authorities. While it’s fine to subsidize a worthy film, the ulterior
reason is nearly always to promote a locale. There are many splendid views of
the Irish landscape, and these certainly give one the desire to go visit.
 |
| Actress Juliette Binoche (photo courtesy of the film) |
On a more
serious level, there’s no reason a film cannot have an Irish setting. But one
wonders about the setting more than necessary, especially as the director is
Norwegian and the lead actress French. Viewers may also find themselves
thinking of the socio-economic context: Do photojournalists really live in such
beautiful House & Gardens-type homes? Can they really take their children
to Kenya, just to help them with a class project on Africa? This may have been
contextualization, or contrast, depicting the wide gulf between the Western world
and that of war zones, but it comes at a cost in focus.
The
post-screening discussion brought up other questions. Hubert Picard maintained
that the excitement of war is what attracts him to conflict areas, not
idealism. In the film the director depicts the dynamic aspect of war
convincingly, especially a scene in Kenya, when the camp that Rebecca and Steph
visit erupts in violence. Without overdramatizing, Binoche’s performance exudes
the adrenalin high of a dangerous job, even in the midst of the awful violence
perpetrated against the African refugees. But the script is coy about the
subject, preferring to focus on the heroine’s idealism, and highlighting how
her photos achieve a concrete result: the reinforcement of security at the
camp. Some in the audience seemed caught up in the idealism and were put out by
the real photographer’s supposed cynicism, as Picard kept stressing the
difference between fiction and reality.
He also
stressed the importance of money, and the competitive nature of many
journalists, including women. But in the film, Binoche seems to be alone on the
job. We don’t get the sense of a hotspot in the news attracting hordes of
photographers, TV journalists and others, all vying for the scoop.
 |
| A scene from L'Epreuve. What motivates war journalists? |
The
photographer was more equivocal about the political dimension of his
profession. Picard maintained that he was solely interested in exclusive,
spectacular photos, and that his impartiality was not affected by being
embedded with American forces. But he admitted being sympathetic to the
American side, and expressed a preference for the right-leaning Figaro
newspaper to Le Monde (which he sarcastically referred to as the world’s
leading Arab newspaper). The young Egyptian woman who’d questioned him on this
point criticized the confluence of money and political partiality that she sees
in media coverage of her own country.
Also called
into doubt were the riveting scenes showing Rebecca following the suicide
bomber’s actions. Picard said that while
“anything is possible”, it’s practically unheard of for journalists to “embed”
with the Taliban. Plausibility is further strained because of recent tragedies
involving journalists falling into the hands of extremists. The director is not
just content to open with an embed sequence - he has his heroine repeat it,
when she returns to Afghanistan. This makes for effective symmetry, and also
serves to show how her character has evolved. But here the film betrays an
adherence not only to fiction, as opposed to documentary, but to out and out
fantasy.
The film’s
general release is on May 6, three days after World Press Freedom Day.
Production: Paradox/Paradox Spillefilm/Film i Väst. Distribution: Global Screen
(worldwide) / Septième Factory (France).
Dimitri
Keramitas is a Paris-based legal specialist and prize-winning writer.
