Review of the film "The Translator" by Guy Ritchie

Review of the film "The Translator" by Guy Ritchie


Guy Ritchie's "The Covenant" is released - a hybrid of a military drama, an action movie and a Western about a strong male friendship between two people who, under other circumstances, could easily become enemies. For the third time in his career, after Revolver (2005) and The Wrath of Man (2021), the director decides to be serious and abandons his signature style with hooligan jokes and swashbuckling editing - and this time the result justifies the efforts made, believes Yulia Shagelman.

The adventures of foreign films in the Russian box office sometimes become a separate plot in itself, placing this or that picture in a context that was not at all intended by its authors. "The Translator" - the second picture of the favorite of domestic viewers Guy Ritchie, coming out in 2023, after "Operation Fortune" - was supposed to appear on the screens in April, but was removed from the road so as not to interfere with the space-patriotic blockbuster "The Challenge" . Now it comes out a week later than Rick Roman Waugh's The Fugitive, presenting a very similar plot about escaping the Taliban (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) in the same scenery of dusty Afghan steppes, mountains and sparse forests, where an armed ambush. Ritchie, like his American, much less well-known colleague, is more inclined towards genre than political interpretation, but he still cannot completely ignore the latter - and he does not set himself such a goal, supplying the inspiring finale with sobering credits.

The film will start in 2018. The American army has been in Afghanistan for almost twenty years, and during this time tens of thousands of local residents began to work for it in exchange for promised visas and relocation to the United States for them and their families, mainly as translators. The opening scene clearly shows what kind of work this is: Sergeant John Kinley's (Jake Gyllenhaal) unit stops a truck on the road for a routine check, the translator tries to convince the driver to open the body, for some reason he resists, the air is filled with the approach of the conflict - and now the real one rumbles, rather than a metaphorical explosion, the interpreter and one of Kinley's subordinates are killed. There is no time to grieve: the task of the sergeant and his group is to find underground handicraft factories where the Taliban make mines, and for this he needs a new translator. The Colonel (Johnny Lee Miller) nominates Ahmed (Dar Salim), an excellent professional who, however, has already been rejected by several units due to his quarrelsome nature.

This character he demonstrates almost immediately, disobeying the sergeant's orders, acting his own way in dangerous situations, and coming into direct conflict with another Afghan officer whom he accuses of betrayal. The most surprising thing is that in all cases he turns out to be right, which, however, still does not contribute to the warming of their relationship with Kinley. The sergeant is even less pleased with the information that Ahmed used to sell heroin, and agreed to cooperate with the Americans only because the Taliban killed his son. Nevertheless, together they go on another mission, as a result of the tragic outcome of which they will find themselves together against the whole world.

The picture is clearly divided into three dramatic acts. The first is the traditional chronicle of the daily reality of war, which its participants treat as a job where danger has become a habit and emotions are blunted. The second is a long and painful game of cat and mouse, a difficult path to salvation through enemy territory, in which the very covenant, as the film is called in the original, is forged - an unspoken but unbreakable covenant or contract. In the third, the heroes are no longer confronted with the Taliban, but with the American state bureaucracy, contempt for which neither they nor the authors hide, but the front-line fraternity and following the principle of “do what you must, and come what may” overcome it too, let only in this particular case.

All this was done in an unusually serious, not to say harsh for Guy Ritchie way. Even the camera work is more calm and measured than in his previous films, with frequent panoramas from above and desert landscapes equally indifferent to all who have been trying to conquer them for centuries. The action scenes are masterfully shot, but the pauses between them are no less, if not more tense - they are literally carried on their shoulders by both actors in the lead roles, especially Dar Salim, who got a more difficult part. But no games with chronology, spinning the action back and forth (it accelerates a little only in the last third), machine-gun dialogues (they don't talk much here at all) and jokes on the verge of a foul. This, of course, is still that purely masculine testosterone world, to which the director constantly refers, and cannot do without rude humor at all. But here he is purely functional, helping to create a distance between himself and the death-soaked and premonition of defeat - only three years left before the Americans leave Afghanistan - a reality. All the most important and important remains in silence, short gazes, greeting and farewell handshakes.



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