Democratic Republic of the Congo: Viva Riva! (2010)
I know very little about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so I had no idea what to expect of a film from there. I knew it was a thriller. I knew it was the first film that had been made in the country for quite some time. I wasn’t expecting much. Over earnest and over ambitious, I think, is what I was preparing myself for. And jungle.
The film’s set in Kinshasa, though, and as you'll find in all cities there’s not actually a great deal of jungle. Kinshasa, in fact, seems very much like many African cities – more modern than most Westerners expect, but with the kind of limitations one finds in countries that have problematic infrastructures. (There are a couple of power cuts during the film – which I half-expected to pay off in the finale and was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong and they were there simply to add background and detail.)
During a fuel shortage petty criminal Riva returns from Angola having stolen a truckload of petrol from a much bigger criminal. He quickly becomes involved with a local gangster’s girlfriend, much to the annoyance of the local gangster. Meanwhile, the Angolan crime lord has made his way to Kinshasa to find Riva, using a paramilitary insurgent as an assistant (because he’s holding her sister hostage).
If the set-up sounds generic it’s because it is, but that’s irrelevant, because it’s extremely well done. The different factions all ring true, as does the depiction of life in Kinshasa, and it’s quite possible that a reading of the film can be made in which the different criminal factions each represent the different political factions whose conflict has made the Congo such a hard place to live. Crucially, at no point does any of this feel forced, and the interplay between the different groups (as they increasingly cross the paths of one another, before leading to the inevitably bloody climax) never crosses the line into predictability or tedium. The characters are well drawn (Riva, in particular, is a charismatic chancer whose charms are quite clear and who therefore seems exactly like the kind of person whose ambition outweighs his abilities to manage the reality).
Crucially, the film looks authentic. It may depict a fragile society which few have experienced, but the country itself seems to be realistically depicted, the realities of a country ravaged by civil war are clear (it’s not just the innocent who suffer, but it’s the innocent who deserve to least of all) and no attempt is made to shy away from some of the uglier truths – violence begets violence, and a casual attitude to death results in a damaged and brutal society.
The cast are uniformly excellent. Coming from a country without a strong filmmaking tradition I wasn’t expecting a great deal, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
Side note: The film was surprisingly raunchy, yet in a way that worked. It was surprising because it was very much what I would expect Paul Verhoeven to make if he was in Africa, but at the same time it felt less gratuitous than Verhoeven would have made it. It somehow fitted the live fast, die young mood of the film, and the casual attitude to death. But I comment on it because I think it's worth mentioning, yet it didn't really fit in with anything I wrote above. I'm not opposed to raunchy scenes in films, I just don't want them to be unnecessary, and I didn't think that was the case here.
So far, the global experiment has proved to be more rewarding that I was expecting.
Disc: DVD (Region 1, Canada)
Source: eBay
Availability: Still widely available; Region 2 editions also exist