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BERLINALE 2014 Competition

Berlinale: Two Men in Town, inevitable embroilment

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- Rachid Bouchareb presents a very convincing Forest Whitaker as a man of good will, hopelessly battling social judgment and his own inner demons...

Berlinale: Two Men in Town, inevitable embroilment

Five years after competing in Berlin with London River [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
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, Rachid Bouchareb is back, this time with a very American adventure set against the backdrop of the immense desert scenery of New Mexico: Two Men in Town [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
. He has, however, been joined again in this project by the English actress Brenda Blethyn, who delicately expresses the restrained compassion demanded by her role as the parole officer responsible for keeping an eye on a kind of gentle monster by the name of William Garnett (Forest Whitaker). Garnett, who has just spent 18 years in prison for the murder of a local cop, hopes that his new Moslem faith will help him not only to wash the blood from his hands, but above all to overcome the uncontrollable bursts of rage he still feels welling up inside him.

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The film's European-North African roots do not stop at Blethyn, the conversion of the main character nor the co-producers united around this ambitious project: Two Men in Town is an adaptationof Deux hommes dans la ville (1973) by French writer/director José Giovanni, or rather a transposition, as the bad cop waiting to pounce on the former inmate as soon as he relapses is now the local sheriff (played by Harvey Keitel), and Garnett's former bandit pals trying to draw him back into their criminal nets are Mexican smugglers who exploit the despair of their own people, ready to do anything to cross the border.

The focus of interest has also changed. While Giovanni's film was a critique of the judiciary system in which we waited to see whether it would finally crush Alain Delon or not, Garnett's position is more complex (which the movie's French title, La Voie de l'ennemi, expresses more clearly by referring to a non-designated "enemy", whereas its international title is a literal translation of Deux hommes dans la ville, which certainly takes on new connotations in this Far West decor): the paths which present themselves to Garnett are more varied. They are all, however, equally un-playable: between the instructions of his parole officer, the sheriff who persecutes him, the bandits who harrass him and the love story he would like to live, Garnett is brought to bay on all sides (it's a small and very suffocating world within these vast landscapes, where one can observe from afar without being seen). He can't take a step in any direction, so that ultimately his choice is whittled down to a personal level, with the plot becoming a psychological evolution. It is well and truly within himself that he must find his path.

Bouchareb made it clear to the press in Berlin that José Giovanni's screenplay had above all served as a point of departure. In fact, his film primarily describes an inner struggle, magnificently conveyed by Whitaker's performance. It tells of a fight to the death, between the will to change represented by the character's religious conversion on the one hand, and on the other the terrible demon which is the deep-seated violence within him. From the first to the very last scene, it tells of a fight lost well in advance, as it is this inner enemy who sets all the wheels in motion.

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(Translated from French)

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