John Boorman is an interesting director whose projects can be brilliant (Point Blank) or so awful they are almost a byword in badness (Zardoz). His latest movie, In My Country, falls somewhere toward the bad end of the scale, but is nonetheless interesting because of the issues it raises about storytelling and truth. It is more ambitious and less conventional than Red Dust, and fails more grandly.
In My Country is based on Antjie Krog’s book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull. The movie’s title was changed, apparently, because there was some concern that American audiences might think it was a horror movie. Of course, it is a horror movie — the horror of the abuses perpetrated by South Africa’s white regime during the apartheid era.
Krog’s book used some of the techniques of fiction to tell a true story or group of stories, as she perceived them; the movie has fictionalised the whole thing. That is, the representation of what went on at the truth commission has been recreated, and it is framed by the reactions and experiences of two observers: Anna Malan, the Krog-figure (Juliette Binoche), and an American journalist, Langston Whitfield (Samuel L Jackson). This means that we’re being given a story about two observers, which immediately complicates things: What is more important, what they observe or their reactions?
The movie never satisfactorily strikes the right balance. It’s hard to tell whether it’s trying to do too much or too little. In the staging of the commission’s hearings, there is a commendable avoidance of the sensational; but, instead, they are often sentimental. And, gradually, as the movie proceeds, the commission becomes background and the story of Anna and Langston seems to take on more importance — which feels overly indulgent. Without the intense inwardness and self-scrutiny that Krog brought to the book, we’re not sure why we should care about Anna and Langston and their angst. If they are emblematic of something, what is it?
Ironically, given the truth commission background, there’s also the question of truth itself. Factual truth and fictional truth are not the same. The former is hard enough to pin down (it’s always plural, not singular), and fictional truth has its own, often inscrutable rules. In My Country fails to provide a convincing form of either kind of truth.