Film Festival Film #4: Jean Charles

[bcholmes]

I melted into a puddle on Sunday, and didn't end up going to two movies. I wonder if there's something about how my sleep patterns have changed in the last six months or so. I've often been quite content to sleep a good eight to nine hours a night. I've been getting six or so pretty regularly for a while now. Not every night, but hm.

Anyway, because of a hectic work schedule, two night classes starting (life drawing and water colour painting), and TIFF, I'm feeling pretty frazzled. I just finished my last big work deliverable this afternoon, and caught Jean Charles down at that fugly new building at Yonge and Dundas.

Jean Charles is a feature film based on the life of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazillian man who was killed by police on the London underground because they misidentified him as a terrorist.

Appropriately, this film tells the story through the eyes of Jean Charles, himself. He's a likable guy -- the kind of person who is personable and gets through life by knowing a lot of people. He's helped three of his cousins sneak into the UK from Brazil to find work to send money back to their families and they're all living together in an apartment.

Much of the story follows Jean or his newly-arrived cousin Vivian. They're working, and testing the waters of new job prospects. They're seeing the city, and enjoying life. They have ups and downs. And, on the periphery of their lives is the growing effect of terrorist attacks on London. They see the transit attacks on television. But it's not really part of their lives.

And then Jean gets shot in the head while he's on a subway car.

After that, we mostly have to follow the lives of the cousins, who initially don't know what's happened to Jean. But then they get called in by the police -- the police lie to them, telling them that Jean was linked to terrorism. That he ignored a police warning, and ran away from them. The cousins can barely follow the English; Scotland Yard hadn't thought to provide translators.

It was a really, really powerful film. Simple in its story-telling. No emotionally overwrought tales of big dreams or the One Important Thing Jean Wanted To Do But Now Will Never Have The Chance! But nonetheless packs quite an emotional wallop. The actor, Luis Miranda, who plays Jean's cousin Alex, especially manages to convey a man completely shattered by grief.

Until this film, I was thinking of Year of the Carnivore as the best of the film's I'd seen. I think Jean Charles is now my favourite.