Tag: Afghanistan

Brotherhood (Bratstvo)

Posted on by victorfraga

Afghanistan, 1989. The Soviet army is on the verge of withdrawing from the country when a bomber is shot down. A literal Chekhov’s gun is confiscated from the pilot, who turns out to be the son of General Vasilev. Thus, an operation is set in motion to rescue him from Mujahideen captivity. The typical band of misfits are gathered, and have to deal with rebels, smugglers, traitors, translators and an increasing lack of purpose.

A film of many names and based on actual events, Brotherhood (aka Leaving Afghanistan) can be seen as Russia’s first Vietnam movie (Kevin Reynolds’s solid Soviet-Afghan themed tank 1988 film The Beast was an American production). Bucking the last years’ trend of flag-waving films – such as Stalingrad (Fyodor Bondarchuk, 2014), Tankers (Konstantin Maximov, 2018) and T-34 (Aleksei Sidorov, 2019) – set during the Great Patriotic War, Brotherhood quickly ran into trouble in Putin’s Russia by instead dealing with the Soviet Union’s forgotten war in Afghanistan.

Some veterans were incensed at the unconventional portrayal of Soviet soldiers. And clearly the protagonists in the Soviet military are not presented as paragons of virtue. They are guzzling vodka and looting ’80s artifacts like ghettoblasters and the Sony Walkman.

But perhaps surprisingly, the film is rather even-handed in its portrayal of the Mujahideen enemy (who of course history would later see morph into warlord factions and eventually the Taliban). The other are given a voice in the form of an erudite leader figure and are seen as more than faceless fundamentalists. I would have wished for more depth to the Afghani liaison, representing the Afghanistan government. In the few scenes he features, it is mostly to beg for harder Soviet measures against the rebels. But that a multifaceted look at the deep complexities of the Soviet-Afghan War lies beyond what can be expected of one film.

Brotherhood only grants a minimum of exposition in the form of overheard TV spots of the Soviet withdrawal, and to get the most out of the film the average Western viewer would do well to at least visit Wikipedia for a history refresher.

Even with accounting for some beautiful mountain scenery (shot in the Caucasus rather than on-location, naturally), the film remains gritty rather than visually sumptuous. Despite the controversial subject matter, the director did have enough support from higher-up veterans in the Russian military that it was possible to shoot scenes with authentic APCs and Mi-24 attack helicopters, which adds a lot to the sense of realism. Special mention must go to some thoroughly disturbing sound effects. Never has the horror of trying to breathe with knife and gunshot wounds been better portrayed.

The war sadly remains topical, with the ongoing Western engagement in Afghanistan’s war without end. The competent Brotherhood is a must for anyone interested in the subject matter. A rare opportunity to see Russian cinema deal with its very own Vietnam.

Brotherhood is based on the memoirs of Afghan war veteran turned FSB spy chief Nikolai Kovalyov. It screened at the Russian Film Week in December, a month which also saw a French DVD and Blu-ray release. Streaming rights yet to be determined.

Black And Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Right at the start of this, Naomie Harris is walking along a New Orleans street when she’s stopped and harassed by two cops. For no reason. Well, there is a reason: she’s black and the cops are white. Except that, as she points out, she herself is a cop too. She’s blue. So reluctantly they have to let her go.

Alicia West (Harris) may be a rookie in her first weeks as a cop, but she’s hardly inexperienced, having served as a soldier in Afghanistan’s Kandahar. She’s joined the police at the same time as officers are being required to wear body cams and thinks these a good idea. However she underestimates the levels of violence meted out by police to members of the public and, conversely, by members of the public to police. Covering for her partner cop Kevin Jennings (Reid Scott) who had planned an evening with his wife before being asked to do a night shift at short notice, she finds herself working alongside grizzled veteran Deacon Brown (James Moses Black) and is shocked to see him use what she thinks is excessive force on a man outside a nightclub. It turns out, however, that the man had a gun and wouldn’t have hesitated to use it on her.

Later on their shift, Brown gets a call which leads them to a warehouse in a derelict urban wasteland. He tells her to stay in the car while he goes inside, but after hearing gunshots she goes in after him . The scene that comes next is the one upon which the film pivots. She sees someone shot – indeed, executed is not too strong a word – by a police officer before the gun is turned on her person and she falls several storeys. Worse, the bent cops have seen her body cam.

From here on in it’s a game of cat and mouse as witness rookie cop attempts to get cam and footage back to headquarters to upload it to the system while a combination of corrupt cops and criminals will stop at nothing to prevent her doing so. Shooter Terry Malone (Frank Grillo) informs the intimidating Darius (Mike Colter) that Alicia West shot Darius’ nephew Zero, so Darius puts the word out by mobile phone. So Alicia finds that not only the bad guys but the entire local community are after her as well. That includes the standoffish Missy (Nafessa Williams), the friend she couldn’t persuade to leave town with her all those years ago.

The film has a further ace up its sleeve in the form of Milo ‘Mouse’ Jackson (a memorable Tyrese Gibson) in whose general store West hides from the cops after every domestic door upon which she knocks refuses her entry. He calls the cops and consequently finds himself on the receiving end of racist abuse. Later, he turns out to be the one friend West has in her quest to deliver the footage and see justice done.

The tense action scenes which follow are skilfully choreographed and photographed and will keep you on the edge of your seat. As a gritty, cops and robbers film, this consequently does everything that’s required of it – and on one level, that ought to be enough. However, the indictment of racism underpinning the whole, with its privileged white cops and its ordinary black locals who don’t trust them because they simply can’t afford to is part of what raises the film to a whole other level. The urban deprivation of post-Katrina New Orleans further underscores all this. And better still, it’s not trying to make a Big Worthy Statement about the US and racism – the racism is simply there as an undercurrent of everything else that’s going on, a far more effective way of highlighting the issue.

Terrific performances by all concerned help no end. Naomie Harris completely convinces as the blue caught between the white privilege of her profession and the black community in which she grew up. Harris has never had a role quite like this – and what she puts on the screen is a revelation.

Finally, be advised that the trailer sells the film as a solid action film. In one sense, that’s true, that’s exactly what it is. However, churning out a run of the mill, bog standard industry trailer does the film a terrible disservice, implying it’s little more than Studio multiplex filler. Yet it’s so much more. This is a dirtylicious gem where you were expecting a mere, by-the-numbers action movie. Don’t miss.

Black And Blue is out in the UK on Friday, October 25th. Available on VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

A Private War

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is the story of the last decade or so of Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin from just before she lost an eye to enemy fire in Sri Lanka in 2001 to her death in an explosive blast in Homs in 2012. Recent events since the film’s completion suggest that she was deliberately targeted and murdered by the Syrian forces.

Director Heineman is a documentary film maker of some considerable repute having made City Of Ghosts (2017) , Cartel Land (2015) and Our Time (2012) and he graduates to feature films here. You can see the attraction of the biographical subject for someone with that background. Judging by the excellent documentary about her Under The Wire (Chris Martin, 2018), Marie was not only something of a force of nature but also an extremely difficult woman to work with and at the same time someone who absolutely refused to play by the accepted rules of the game. She got herself in to inaccessible places and got information out to the world about what was happening in them.

Our review of Under The Wire suggested Colvin as a perfect subject for a feature adaptation and that “more psychological rigour would’ve deepened the story”, something A Private War has gone for in no uncertain terms and which does indeed lend it some extra gravitas in certain parts. That review further suggested that there could have been greater emphasis on why journalists go to such lengths in order to tell their stories, in which regard alas the current film doesn’t do quite so well.

As the narrative approaches Marie’s death, the list of places from which she reports plays out like a countdown: Marzak, Afghanistan 2009, Misrata, Libya, 2011, Homs, Syria 2012. Yet, in the end, the script doesn’t quite get under why Colvin pursued the career that she did. Addiction to constantly putting herself in danger is mentioned, but never really explored at length. Maybe Heineman should have looked at the wonderfully dirty Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986) with its secondary cameraman character (Jon Savage) who’ll do anything to capture that perfect, photographic news shot. We don’t quite get that sense or anything like it here.

Nevertheless, Rosamund Pike is fantastic as the hard-bitten, globetrotting, one-eyed newshound who won’t take any nonsense from anyone. And there are some amazing transition scenes such as entering her London home, finding the interior covered with a mixture of flaking plaster and camouflage netting as her mind descends into the stuff nightmares derived from in the field traumas. More of this sort of material would have served the piece well.

Instead the script tries for historicity but trips up via an over-reliance on stereotypes. Its supporting character thumbnail of cameraman Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) works well enough as the recording eyes to Colvin’s own descriptive prose, but her London editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) feels like a cliché as he tells her that everyone’s behind her, there’ll always be a place for her at the paper and so on.

A new girl called Kate (Faye Marsay) control alt delete’s Marie’s crashed computer back into working again in the office, turns up a couple of times abroad then mysteriously fades away from the narrative. A seasoned fellow reporter called Norm seems to exist for no other reason than for his later death under fire to shock us.

And then there’s the drama’s opening/closing shot, a spectacular and highly detailed crane up from the ground to reveal a panorama of Syria’s war-ravaged city of Homs in ill-advisedly minute, computer generated detail which both dominates and sits uneasily alongside everything else in a film which never approaches this clearly very expensive shot’s sense of devastated landscape.

The subject matter is still pretty strong stuff and moments like Colvin’s interviewing Yasser Arafat and seeing his dead body not long afterwards certainly deliver. When she broadcasts live to the world from a building in the middle of besieged Homs the scene can’t really fail to inspire because it was such a brave and amazing thing to do in real life and its representation here does it justice.

Elsewhere, though, you wish the film would go hell for leather into the mind of this extraordinary woman but it never quite does: the whole should somehow have added up to a much greater sum of its parts. Little bits of voice over and brief footage of the real life Marie Colvin herself talking at the end suggest what might have been. A Private War pales beside such dirtylicious films about war correspondents as The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984) or the aforementioned Salvador. It’s good, but it ought somehow to have been better.

A Private War is out in the UK on Friday, February 15th. On VoD on Monday, June 10th.