Across Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a battle was waged in casual headwear: the most popular rejoinder to the red MAGA hats were blue caps instead protesting that we “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. English socialist writer George Orwell has never fallen out of relevance since his death in 1950, but the normalisation of the far-right in global politics, and the fall in commonly held standards of truth, has seen the adjective “Orwellian” used to describe our own reality, rather than fictional dystopias. After his eloquent James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film] deployed the African-American writer’s work for its entire voice-over, director Raoul Peck repeats this method in Orwell: 2+2=5 [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], which first bowed at Cannes, with its long festival tour taking it to BFI London last week.

Orwell was also a prolific writer of non-fiction reportage and first-person essays, and Peck curates passages from these read by actor Damian Lewis, alongside his classic novels 1984 and Animal Farm, to narrate the writer’s eventful life story, overlaid against archive footage, relevant photos and newly shot B-roll in the locations described. But whilst Orwell’s (who was born Eric Arthur Blair, in colonial India) intellectual formation is shown through the self-critique of his class status, and his leftist principles beckoning him to volunteer for the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War, Peck’s prime motivation seems to be in tracking 1984’s frightening alignment with the present day. The film’s rhetorical stridency comes in the director’s assurance that he can overlay quotations from a novel published in 1949 against Trump, Putin and other contemporary strongman leaders and autocrats, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and have it perfectly describe them. As the montage suggests, mass data collection and the surveillance state are modern manifestations of the text’s propaganda figure Big Brother; the sly compressions of language by neoliberal politicians to disguise the “truth” are a version of Newspeak; and rising inequality and social stratification edge us closer to the ruthlessly micro-managed superstate of Oceania.

Whilst these comparisons and other classic Orwellian neologisms (doublethink, memory hole et al) have occurred to many commentators, there’s still an awkward disjuncture as Peck tries to cram all current global iniquity into the writer’s visionary yet still-finite mythos. Orwell turned to allegorical fiction at the end of his literary life, transmitting the political principles he always passionately asserted, but now more indirectly and suggestively – and by evidence of its long legacy, most effectively. We must remember that 1984 is also a savagely funny and playful book, as opposed to just a screed, using dramatic licence to take his real inspirations from Soviet communism and Nazism to even more expressionistic, nightmarish extremes. Whilst his film has an off-putting didacticism, in its strongest moments, we feel Peck’s unconvinced wavering as to whether an Orwellian dystopia is already present, or whether 1984 can still equip us and warn us against even worse developments, be they authoritarianism or unregulated AI.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is a production by the USA and France, staged by Jigsaw Productions and Velvet Film, in co-production with Universal Pictures Content Group. Its international sales are courtesy of Goodfellas.