London River

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in London on 7/7/2005, two parents arrive in search of their children: a white woman who lives in Guernsey, and an African man who comes from France, where he works. She is Christian, he Muslim. She is aghast at the changes in London: Muslims everywhere, including the neighborhood in which her daughter had a flat. When she arrives at the address, she incredulously verifies with the taxi driver that it is indeed the right place. He has lived in France for 15 years, has not seen his son in all that time, and arrives at the behest of his estranged wife to find their son.

Stephen Holden writes in the NY Times: Its stars, Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyaté, couldn’t possess more dissimilar screen presences. Ms. Blethyn, the British actress best known for “Secrets and Lies,” belongs to the Mike Leigh school of minutely detailed naturalism. Mr. Kouyaté, who died in April 2010 at 73, was associated for many years with the ritualistic theater of Peter Brook. Tall and gaunt, with graying dreadlocks, his deep-set eyes conveying a stoic, bone-weary resignation, he suggested a mythic African pilgrim leaning on a walking stick while roaming the world on an endless spiritual journey. “London River,” whose title evokes the city’s multicultural stream, was his final film.

A reviewer in the Telegraph UK praised it. Kouyaté, the Burkinabé veteran who died in April this year, won Berlin’s best-actor award, and it’s hard to imagine this film without his gangly, dignified stoicism at its heart. For Blethyn, who has sometimes been broad to the point o caricature, it’s a rare chance to explore a deeply plausible character from the inside out, reminding you how subtly she can handle reflexive, Middle England prejudice while keeping you on side. The film around them is timid at times, a little hemmed in by its own scrupulous humanism, but it still affords as moving an acting partnership as you’ll see all year.


In RottenTomatoes, it gets 90% - 65% marks, well illustrating how critics have a different (in this case, better) grasp of the artistry of a film.

I very much liked it.