White Man’s Reflection – Weekend

In the Russian box office – a new film by Guy Ritchie. This time, the author, who is extremely beloved in Russia, decided to digress from the amusing showdowns of tough London guys and tell his faithful viewer, based on real events, the story of the salvation of one comrade by another. As often happens in the modern world, for this he will need not only a machine gun, but also a visa in his passport.

Text: Vasily Stepanov

2018, Lashkargah, Afghanistan. An American reconnaissance unit is ambushed and takes on an overwhelming force of militants – as a result, only the seriously wounded Sergeant John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the local translator of the Americans, Ahmed (Dar Salim), remain alive. To save the commander’s life, Ahmed will have to do the impossible – literally on his hump to pull the wounded out of the zone controlled by the enemy. Returning to the United States, John tries to repay the debt to the savior – Ahmed and his family need to get out of the country where a reward has been put on their heads. But bureaucracy in the form of a mustachioed Johnny Lee Miller in military uniform is unlikely to speed up the issuance of travel documents. As is often the case not only in the movies, but also in life, nothing will budge until John himself takes care of the evacuation, leaving his wife and children to worry in cozy California.

This is briefly the simple plot of Guy Ritchie’s new action movie, as usual, brutal and masculine, but devoid of the postmodern irony familiar to most British films and completely unexpected for him – especially against the backdrop of the previous spy burlesque “Operation Fortune” – relevant. After the dramatic evacuation in 2021, the remnants of American units from Kabul and the coming to power of the Taliban (in Russia, this organization is recognized as a terrorist organization and banned), they prefer not to remember the twenty-year campaign, but in a world where the news feed already almost entirely consists of combat reports, a movie about traumas of war and its inevitable victims have to be looked at in a special way.

Important for the film is the conflict of an individual with the state-leviathan, which he literally feeds with his own blood. Any government likes to hide behind human interests, making endless promises and trying with all its might to evade responsibility. In November 2001, more than two months after the fall of the Twin Towers, when military operations against the Taliban, who supported Osama bin Laden, were just beginning, the first 1,300 American troops were deployed to a distant Asian country. Ten years later there were almost 100,000 of them. To help this army, 50,000 local interpreters were hired, who were promised visas and the opportunity to move to America by the US government. Approximately such a text, set out in dry credits, begins “Translator”, setting the tone for what is happening. Has the government kept its promise? Partly. Ritchie brings to your attention a special case from general practice. His hero waited for his documents and the flight that took him and his loved ones from certain death. But how many are unlucky?

In the original, “Translator” has a slightly more pathetic name – “Vow” or “Covenant” – but the Russian version for once seems much more appropriate. He nails the poetry of exotic warfare and military brotherhood to the dusty Afghan soil. There is no place for colonial Kiplingian romance in this murderous work. If you want poetry, then it is better to re-read the Afghan cycle of Joseph Brodsky once again, where “the stones lie like a second army” and “the sky is like crumbling lime.” Ritchie, due to the habit acquired over the years of talking about violence in the language of a comic book, has either lost sensitivity to it, or, on the contrary, absolutely consciously shies away from any sophistication – he is not up to subtleties and halftones, not up to metaphors. This can be seen in the slovenliness of the picture and the disregard for the choreography of the shootings, which usually still occupied the director. “Translator”, on the one hand, exists within the visual framework established by documentary masterpieces about the last Afghan war – “Restrepo” (2010) or “Armadillo” (2010), and on the other hand, it looks like any other modern film about a far from Western ecumene bang Bang. No, no, but there will be a heroic lower angle a la Rambo and somehow heroically dance into a falling shutter, and the enemies will inevitably mix into an indistinguishable black-brown biomass, which is not a pity. No wonder even the rescued Afghan does not have a last name. And his wife doesn’t even have a name. What happened to him? From whom and why is he hiding? Why is he taking revenge on the Taliban, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Americans? None of this matters to the author. Just Akhmed is enough, because The Translator is, first of all, a movie about the active reflection of a white man who, despite all the dangers that threaten him, returns to a hot spot to drag his burden.

Available from June 1st

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