With the conspicuous and magnificent exception of Chris Morris, filmmakers in Britain have shied away from the contemporary issue of 7/7 and suicide bombing on British soil. It falls to the French director Rachid Bouchareb to make what is, so far, the only substantial feature specifically on 7/7, in the form of London River.
He brings to the subject an outsider’s view: very different, I suspect, from how a self-consciously speechified British-made drama might look. It is the story of two middle-aged people — prosperous Guernsey smallholder Elisabeth (Brenda Blethyn) and African migrant worker Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté) — who have come to London, suspecting that their missing children have been killed in the bombings and desperate to find the truth.
Between these two lost souls develops a hesitant, painful friendship. Bouchareb brings in two of his repertory équipe for supporting roles: Sami Bouajila is an imam, apparently at the Finsbury Park mosque, and Roschdy Zem is a local shopkeeper and landlord.
The film is, perhaps, in plot terms, a little contrived; Bouchareb’s view of xeroxed “missing” notices up on walls looks more like 9/11 New York than 7/7 London and the French-speaking London police officer who volunteers the fact that he is a Muslim is also slightly artificial.
But everything is acted with intelligence and dignity and the movie is an honourable, humanist attempt to elucidate common experience and common ground between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, as well as to see the 7/7 bombings as part of a global convulsion. Yet it also, in its final grim moments, emphasises the victims’ bitterness, alienation and loss.
When Elisabeth comes to the capital all she has to go on is the address of her daughter’s flat in north London, where she discovers a change in her domestic situation. Where Elisabeth is querulous and nervous, Ousmane is stoic and calm, and her anxiety increases when the police, at first blandly unhelpful, begin to investigate their children’s lives intensely. It becomes chillingly clear that they do indeed suspect that Elisabeth and Ousmane’s children have died in the bombings — for a very specific reason.
The sense of loss brings these two lonely people together. At first wary, they find a relationship, perhaps even a sort of affaire de coeur, that flowers delicately with the longed-for arrival of what may be good news. But the intimacy involved is fragile, founded on a blank and teetering on an abyss.
Elisabeth and Ousmane work the soil, though at very different status levels: she at her farm, he as a forest labourer in France, attempting to protect endangered elms, which, Elisabeth tells him, still survive in Guernsey. It is a gentle, happy augury, though the irony of their being brought together by global tides of fear and hate threatens to engulf moments of tenderness like these.
Bouchareb is known for epic tales of Franco-Algerian history in his films Days of Glory and Outside the Law, and this small-scale study has not been much noticed, despite winning prizes at last year’s Berlin film festival. But London River is a thoughtful, resonant meditation on 7/7. —