Directed by Hubert Sauper. (PG) 107 min. Opens May 20.
If the end of the world needs a location, Tanzania is a prime choice
of real estate. This austere, grueling and very troubling documentary
depicts the many woes afflicting the central African country. Austrian
filmmaker Hubert Sauper paints Tanzania as the victim of a complex and
punishing dynamic that exists between industrialized nations and the
developing world.
The title of Darwin's Nightmare refers
to the bitterly ironic evolutionary triumph of a peculiar inhabitant of
Lake Victoria, the planet's largest tropical lake. Introduced to the
lake by a scientist in the 1960s, the Nile Perch has succeeded in
killing off nearly all the native fish species. It's so ravenous, it
even eats its own young. Though an ecological disaster for Lake
Victoria, this development has been a great boon to the fishery
business, which now exports thousands of tons of Nile Perch to Europe
every year. Russian cargo planes arrive nearly daily to drop off their
contents before loading up with fish. Sometimes the Russians bring food
for the area's millions of starving refugees. Other times -- as Sauper
eventually confirms after much digging around -- they import the
weapons that enable impoverished Africans to murder each other in one
or another of the civil wars taking place nearby.
The list of
tribulations doesn't end there, lest we forget the spread of AIDS and
the constant threat of famine. Sauper also discovers how much the local
street urchins like getting high off chemicals in the fish boxes. It's
more than enough calamities to appease any Old Testament prophet or,
for that matter, any WTO-hating critic of globalized business
practices. Sauper's film plays to the latter sensibility a little too
cravenly, often relying on easy juxtapositions for effect, i.e.,
cutting from a panel of fat-cat European bureaucrats to African
children beating each other for food. The filmmaker is also less
inclined to present his human subjects as people than as symptoms of
the greater crisis. Yet
Darwin's Nightmare exhibits great force
as a film, if only because the situation it presents is so deeply
appalling. It's the feel-bad movie of the summer.