‘Barbarians’ a well-crafted study of savage rule
Fans of the Tom Hanks vehicle “Greyhound” may want to check out another throwback to the well-made, military period film of yore. Based on a 1980 novel by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, adapted by Coetzee and directed by award-winning Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra (“Birds of Passage”), “Waiting for the Barbarians” has pedigree to spare. This includes a 2005 Philip Glass opera also based on the Coetzee book. The film has Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp in its cast.
Academy Award-winner Rylance is the story’s Christlike protagonist, an unnamed magistrate in a small frontier post in a mid-19th century Asian part of some Western Empire, probably British. The gentle magistrate is a scholar and an amateur archaeologist interested in the past of the country in which he finds himself. He pays a visit to a friendly young courtesan in the fortress town and is on good terms with the locals, the soldiers of the fort and their
maternal cook (Greta Scacchi). But everything changes when a imperial policeman named Col. Joll (Depp), who wears a pair of uncommon dark glasses, arrives in a small coach with a contingent of soldiers of his own.
Although the magistrate has lived in peace, the colonel is convinced that there is “unrest” among the indigenous “barbarians,” and he tortures an old indigenous man to death, claiming to have found out important intelligence. Joll returns from an expedition with several more indigenous men and women, whom he also tortures. The magistrate takes in one crippled victim, a young nomadic woman (Gana Bayarsaikhan) whose ankles have been broken and whose eyesight has been damaged by her captors, using the prongs of a fireheated fork. The magistrate washes the woman’s feet and tries to nurse the woman back to health in his quarters, sharing his bed with her and sleeping at her feet.
That almost everyone speaks English in this “back of beyond” is a bit off-putting. Like “Lawrence of Arabia,” a film that “Waiting for the Barbarians” resembles at times (both were shot in Morocco), “Waiting for the Barbarians” uses subtitles sparingly.
Depp looks demonic in his black glasses and may remind some of the Brando of “Apocalypse Now.” He is the imperial henchman, who believes that “pain” and “truth” are interchangeable and whose crackdown on real or imagined rebellion spawns legions of fighters seeking revenge. Pattinson, as Joll’s enforcer, is malignant enough to make you eager to see his version of the Dark Knight. Rylance is riveting as the surprisingly insolent, would-be man of peace crushed beneath the boot heel of brutality. With not much more than a single scene, Aussie Sam Reid (TV’s “Prime Suspect 1973”) leaves a lasting impression, oozing arrogance.
The cinematography of two-time Academy Award winner Chris Menges (“The Mission,” “The Killing Fields”) is lushly intimate inside the torch, lamp and candlelit fort and glowing and expansive in the desert and mountains. The music of Giampiero Ambrosi is suitably dirge-like and nerve rattling.
Like the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, Coetzee and Guerra let the “colonizers” reveal themselves to be the true barbarians. If we are “waiting” for anything, it is civilization.