Constantly gripping

The Constant Gardener
Venice Film Festival

Only George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck generated as much applause after its press screening as Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener at the Venice Festival.

Which of the two films the international jury will prefer is in the lap of the gods but, if justice is served, both should win prizes.

Meirelles's film, an adaptation of the John le Carré novel about the perfidy of the multinational pharmaceutical companies, using the Third World as a cheap testing ground for new drugs, has Ralph Fiennes aptly cast as a British diplomat, the constant gardener of the title, whose politically active wife (Rachel Weisz) embarrasses the British High Commission in Kenya and incurs the wrath of a corrupt government and pharmaceutical companies.

She is murdered and, although her husband is tortured by the fact that she might have been unfaithful to him, he picks his way through a highly dangerous maze to find the culprits.

Meirelles, the Brazilian who made City of God, has a restless, somewhat choppy style that may confuse some as it flits between past and present, but paints a picture of Africa that is surely one of the most authentic on film.

You can almost smell the place. As he is a director from the Third World, you can see that his anger at the duplicity and injustice of the Big Pharma matches that of le Carré's.

What he fails to do, perhaps because it is virtually impossible, is to match le Carré's amazing research on the precise methods of these companies in Africa.

So the film becomes as much a thriller as a political and social statement. Even so, the performances of Fiennes and Weisz are outstanding and the result is a film that, though hopefully commercial, brings le Carré to the screen with more subtlety than usual.

It also succeeds in showing that the multinational companies have a lot to answer for where the poor of the world are concerned.