Waiting for the Barbarians **** (2019, Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson) – Movie Review

Mark Rylance is tremendous in a low-key, bright-burning performance as The Magistrate ruling benignly over an empire’s distant outpost, who is confronted by the arrival of evil torturing policeman Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), in director Ciro Guerra’s English language debut, following The Wind Journeys (2009), Embrace of the Serpent (2015) and Birds of Passage (2018). Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) is quietly angry, dark, morose, grim, and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes delicate and subtle.

Ciro Guerra’s indictment of colonialism, empire and the repression of indigenous communities is both a tremendously beautiful and ugly film. It is a slow, subdued and arty burn, but it delivers much polished satisfaction. The screenplay by Cape Town, South Africa-born John Maxwell Coetzee (‘Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt’) is based on his own novel. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2003. Though The Magistrate is clearly English, the film goes for universality and is a meant as an allegory. Literary allegories are difficult to turn in to satisfying films, but this one does. Visually as well as intellectually, it achieves the status of an important mini epic, even in a relatively short running time of 112 minutes.

Wearing dark glasses almost throughout, and speaking in a weird monotonous accent, possibly colonial English, Depp matches Rylance for intensity, in a weird but effective, major star support performance, a masterclass in creepiness, though Robert Pattinson has disappointingly little to do as Joll’s equally evil factotum, Officer Mandel, another eager torturer. Pattinson looks a real bad guy, a human vampire, out-weirding Depp. Greta Scacchi (as grannie Mai), David Dencik (as The Clerk) and Sam Reid (replacing originally cast Joe Alwyn as The Lieutenant) have even less to do, and are all good. Gana Bayarsaikhan fits the bill exactly but has not really got a very rewarding role as The Girl, the tortured blind woman befriended dangerously by The Magistrate.

Filmed on a vast desert canvas and a handful of arresting interiors, it is eye-catchingly shot by British veteran Chris Menges on stunning locations in Morocco and in Italy in November and December 2018. Giampiero Ambrosi’s eerie score is another asset, along with the production design by Crispian Sallis and Domenico Sica.

Coetzee borrows his title from a poem by the Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy.

Waiting for the Barbarians screens at the BFI London Film Festival on 6 October 2019 after its world premiere at the 2019 Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2019 in competition as a nominee for the Golden Lion for Best Film.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com