if
you have HBO - Don't miss the extraordinary film
LUMUMBA
this weekend.
On
the east coast, it's showing at 10pm on February 16, Saturday.
On the west coast, it seems to be showing at 1AM Sunday night,
February 17. Check HBO listings for other times: http://www.hbo.com/NASApp/schedule/
LUMUMBA:
"The story of political leader Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first
prime minister who helped lead his country to independence from
Belgium in the late 1950s. Lumumba's vision of a united Africa
gained him powerful enemies: the Belgian authorities, who wanted
a much more paternal role in their former colony's affairs, and
the CIA, who supported Lumumba's former friend Joseph Mobutu.
This was in order to protect U.S. business interests in Congo's
vast resources and their upper hand in the Cold War power balance.
During the tenuous first six months of Congo's independence when
civil war threatened to erupt, Lumumba tried to quell hostilities
but was eventually betrayed by Mobutu whom he had appointed as
head of the army. In 1961 with several conspiracies occurring
at once, Lumumba met a brutal death--a mere nine months after
becoming the country's first Prime Minister."
Chicago Tribune Review of Lumumba
By Michael Wilmington
"Lumumba"
is a historical movie drama that paints its subject with keen
analytical rigor but doesn't sap it of life. Packed with incident,
the film also crackles with danger, simmers with hope. And like
its subject, radical Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, it may
sharply divide audiences along political lines.
But
it shouldn't. The film, a 10-year labor of love for its co-writer/director,
Raoul
Peck, is an exemplary portrait of the brief, stormy political
career of Lumumba, who was elected the free Congo's first prime
minister in June 1960 and was executed in January 1961 by his
political foes. Peck frames the film with that execution and uses
for occasional narration a letter the condemned Lumumba (played
by Eriq Ebouaney) is writing his wife while being driven in a
truck to his death.
Trapped
by our knowledge of the end, we never really experience fully
the exhilaration of his meteoric political rise or the thrill
of his role in the Congo's independence movement as Peck re-creates
them both on screen. But we don't need to. "Lumumba" is the tale
of a promise lost, a dream destroyed. Rather than a call to arms,
it's a tragic portrait of a complex man whose ideals may have
been too unbending for his place and time, one of those historical
figures whose intransigence costs them their life but gains them
a permanent place in history.
The
Haitian-Congolese-French Peck, who knows Lumumba's story well,
makes no secret of his sympathy for his subject. For Peck, Lumumba
is clearly a tragic hero. Yet "Lumumba" isn't shallow movie agitprop,
nor is it the sort of sentimentalized hagiography you might expect
from an obvious Lumumba admirer. Peck has studied and shaped the
material for years (even making an earlier documentary on the
subject, the prize-winning 1991 "Lumumba -- Death of a Prophet"),
and he succeeds in conveying a complex view of the man and his
world and also in bringing Lumumba searingly to life, thanks in
part to Ebouaney's performance.
Ebouaney has Lumumba's tense posture and burning eyes, and he
uses his physical resemblance to suggest both the character's
bravery and stubbornness. In a long flashback, Peck follows Lumumba
from the dawn of his political career, his years as beer salesman,
organizer and political prisoner, right up to his death and, in
a withering coda, shows us a posthumous elegy from one of the
men who brought him down, eventual president Joseph Mobutu (Alex
Descas). In between, we meet Lumumba's wife, Pauline (Mariam Kaba);
fellow Congolese leaders and rivals; Mobutu, his predecessor;
first president Joseph Kasa Vubu (Maka Kotto); and secessionist
leader from the Katanga province Moise Tshombe (Pascal Nzonzi).
Finally, there are members of the old Belgian establishment like
Walter Van der Meersch (Andre Debaar) and General Emile Janssens
(Rudi Delhem) of the Force Publique, or civil army.
Black
or white, good or evil, all these characters are depicted by Peck
with an even hand and a cool eye -- and he doesn't stint on Lumumba's
own flaws or the questionable areas of his tenure: the massacres
committed under his watch, his unyielding combativeness.
But
he also focuses on the qualities that earned Lumumba his legend.
We see how he moves from seeming despair as a savagely beaten
political prisoner to sudden fame as a congressional independence
delegate before Belgium's King Leopold -- and finally to his last
post as the Congo's prime minister and defense minister of the
newly elected free government.
Throughout,
he is a political lightning rod whose radical views alienate the
local establishments, white and black, causing the country to
plunge into chaos and Lumumba himself to become a target for Congolese
opponents and world powers -- including the United States. Finally,
as if in a Kafkaesque maze, Lumumba is trapped in smaller and
smaller quarters: a room, a motor caravan, a little boat -- and
another jail cell, where he is beaten even more viciously than
before.
Almost
every movie biography leaves out too much. But "Lumumba" skimps
on little. We get strong impressions of all the people and issues
involved. And though "Lumumba's" core audience will remain those
who already are familiar with the story and the period, the film
does succeed in making the story universal, giving us the drama
as well as the history, the fire as well as cool examination.
It's a movie that haunts you afterward, filled with scenes --
Mobutu's crafty diplomacy in Lumumba's house, Janssen's arrogance,
the mercurial congress, the last incident of Lumumba's capture
on a river bank and the burning of his body on a dark plain --
that give you a real sense of the anguish of violent historical
transitions and those caught up in them.
