This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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3 September
This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Funding apart, there really is little point in having a film set in a country where all the cast speaks English, but they are supposed to sound as if they speak it with the accent of that country.
To that end, Rachel McAdams (who was not identifiable even as a non-German, despite being the love interest in Midnight in Paris (2012)) was alone worth the sole language coach’s fee, whereas Willem Dafoe desperately drifted, but that was better than the respected Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, despite his German name, sounded most often like the best of Richard Burton than any Günther Bachmann.
What was, McAdams apart, the point of this exercise, where Germans such as Nina Hoss (Irna Frey, and who played the lead in Barbara (2012)) were in no way matched by the non-Germans ? One has no doubt that Hoss could have spoken English with less of an accent than the one that the non-Germans were not picking up…
That apart, however nicely the production was put together, more of the same with the script (maybe to be laid at author John Le Carré’s door) : one big dénouement (perhaps predictable) to account for why a man who, under Russian torture (as Günther observes), confesses to crimes and who anyway fits the visual image of the dodgy muslim fundamentalist (until he trims some hair), can prove to be actually more like Prince Myshkin than a jihadist.
Frankly, if that is what one takes from the film, that a man who admits that the non-organization that he heads has no status will not be done over in seeking to protect this Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) and that said Karpov needed some love, then that is not worth the price of the ticket.
Ah, but one forgets the original soundtrack ! As Hamburg is the home of a sailing nation and a commercial centre, accordion slowed down so that sea-shanties became unrecognizable, incorporating the sound of also slowed data-transmissions into composition, and otherwise imitating Arvo Pärt’s procedure of tintinnabulation – all of that must have made it worthwhile after all.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
