The Bang Bang Club
Photographers of war perform their difficult job in “The Bang Bang Club”, a drama inspired by real events covered by very good actors and staged entirely appropriate. Director Steven Silver will perhaps not be the next Oliver Stone, but his first feature-length fiction film does not lack power and intrigue.
There is not only the soldiers going off to battle, but also photographers and journalists. There are just four that are in South Africa to document the end of apartheid. This tandem should be careful, because this is not necessarily a job where you made of old bones.
The art of war photographer is not a subject that has been treated in recent years in cinema. Leaving aside the interesting but not wholly successful “Welcome to Sarajevo” that Michael Winterbottom has directed in 1997, it is almost back to 1980 to see the best album of the genre: the dazzling “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe (and again, it was print journalism), the hectic “Under Fire” by Roger Spottiswoode and, of course, the excellent “Salvardor” which defined the career of director Oliver Stone.
This is where that lands “The Bang Bang Club”. Without being at the height of its models, the narrative quickfire no trouble holding its breath. The wire between action and emotion is always tense, war-like rhetoric does not want too clever manipulator scenario from the book of Joao Silva and Greg Marinovich is a good overview of the issues. All summed up in less than two hours is not clear and progress does not suffer too much of these ellipses and these omissions.
The performance of actors is also in the note. This has long been abandoned Ryan Phillippe leading man roles and offers a good performance here, both intense and charismatic. If the “hero”, the centerpiece of the exchequer, it is surrounded by very good actors often unknown not only pawns in this game of glory and death.
With its good looks, Taylor Kitsch could be the weak link in the story. Instead, the star of the television series “Friday Night Lights” provides, putting his whole body in the service role. Especially when he was offered to be the most fascinating of the lot: one of the famous Kevin Carter will face difficult choices, especially that of taking the best possible shots and to help the people that figure in front of his movie camera objective.
Filmmaker Steven Silver is from the documentary and it shows. He opts for a simple and precise, preferring to explore in depth about it rather than stylized. No doubt the writer’s chair, he put on white gloves to remove as much as possible politicized aspects to keep the human elements. Approach a little too “neutral” which contrasts with the constant risk-taking of his characters.
Less flamboyant than a “Salvador”, but much more enlightening than “Blood Diamond” in his way of describing the workings of a troubled region, “The Bang Bang Club” is a very good movie with no pretensions to that profession to many dangers that still remains critical to the successful implementation of democracy. Reason to be confident for the future of the director.
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