The Look: Hallucinatory travelogue
The new Fernando Mereilles picture is being promoted as a tale of
global intrigue, but given the impact made by the director's previous
City of God, a virtual cherry-bomb of riotous,
kinetic imagery (Miramax kept it in theaters for more than 13 months),
insiders are as interested in how it looks as what it's about. On that
score, The Constant Gardener hardly disappoints. Few
high-profile pictures are shot in Africa these days, and the DI work
here highlights the beefy reds of the Kenyan desert captured by DP
Cà©sar Charlone, as well as the rich skin tones of the population. Seen
mainly in flashbacks because her character's death sets the story in
motion, actress Rachel Weisz has a sensual, tactile presence in overtly
luminous scenes that are intercut with jumps to a flater, monochromatic
present day, as husband Ralph Fiennes mourns her passing. There's a
strong emotional argument for using stark visual contrast to cue a
film's different settings and moods — call it the "Soderbergh
doctrine" — but the effect here is more like two completely different
films. More subtly effective is Charlone's trick, probably executed in
camera and accented in the DI suite, of adjusting the exposure by
opening up the iris within the span of a single shot, conveying
emotional isolation by deliberately blasting out the highlights of the
image. Bottom line, this is beautifully and engagingly filmed, with a
look that's really opened up by the DI handled by Framestore CFC.