No murder in paradise
2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 385; Issue: 9980 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s0140-6736(15)60929-1
ISSN1474-547X
Autores ResumoThe powerful but flawed film Child 44, set in early 1950s' Russia, is an adaptation of the bestselling thriller by Tom Rob Smith, whose central theme is taken from the true story of the serial child murderer Andrei Chikatilo. Directed by Daniel Espinosa, whose previous films include Safe House and Easy Money, Child 44 starts with a boy escaping from an orphanage and joining the army. A refugee from the Holodomor, the Ukranian famine-genocide of the 1930s, Leo Demidov becomes a World War 2 hero and joins the MGB, or secret police. Leo, played by Tom Hardy, whose sensual presence pretty much carries the film, is married to Raisa, played by Noomi Rapace. Despite Leo's public declaration of infatuation for her, a brief sex scene shows her indifferent, elsewhere. While chasing a presumed traitor in a remote area, Leo's colleague Vassili murders a man and his wife, orphaning their children. Leo humiliates Vassili for this, creating a lifelong enemy. Then a child is found murdered. The family are told that he must have been hit by a train because in Stalin's Russia “there is no murder in paradise”. And then a second child's body is found. Everyone in this international cast speaks English in a Russian accent. Accents are easy to get wrong, and they can be unintentionally hilarious. But perhaps the attempt to homogenise this aspect of the production symbolises the challenge this story presented to its creators. Child 44 tries to do a number of things at once—political critique, spy adventure, whodunnit, and the testing of an unexamined marriage. It would be ambitious to put these together anyway, but to Hollywoodise them convincingly as well seems to defy the laws of physics. Plus, Cold War history means that the Hollywood representation of the so-called Red Peril is always going to have a tension within it—political bombast is part of Hollywood escapism. The film has apparently already been banned in Russia and a number of former Soviet states, allegedly for its negative portrayal of the Soviet era. Yet so many portraits of Soviet life at that time make it seem genuinely absurd and terrifying, from the intricacies of denunciation to, as portrayed in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, citizens being punished for having been taken prisoner in World War 2. When Raisa is named as an informant, Leo refuses to denounce her and as punishment they are sent to a grim industrial town, where General Nesterov (Gary Oldman) is Leo's new boss. Leo rather assertively takes ownership of the case when yet another child's body is found, and manages to persuade the General that a proper investigation is needed. The effect on a person's mental health of being ordered to betray a loved one, and then when you refuse, being sent away from everything you know to a terrible place as punishment, can only be imagined. Assuming the terrible stories of Soviet life under Stalin are true—if we accept the 24/7 paranoia, the impossibility of trust, the way institutionalised cruelty must have constellated in every relationship, and the overdeveloped superego that a citizen of that time would surely have grown up with, the Hollywood way is not best suited to capturing the subtleties of the bleakness. Perhaps, as with the recent film Birdman, which also needed a more subtle presentation, an arthouse/European approach would have made the movie more ambiguous and creepier. Hollywood demands big bangs and heavily binary show and tell, with goodies and baddies. But a hero in such a structure, such as Leo, who has climbed the military ranks from nowhere, would not have achieved this by being kind to others, despite the pull of his empathic conscience when children are hurt. At the end I wanted to know more. Where did Raisa learn her really impressive fighting skills? Why does Nesterov capitulate so easily to the disgraced Leo? The killer is played by an excellently creepy Paddy Considine, who I wish we had seen more of. However, criticisms aside, Child 44 contains some striking scenes and has a large-scale visual generosity.
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