Route Irish (15) 109 mins **
Benda Bilili! (PG) 85 mins ***
Having poked his head around multiplex doors with 2009’s Looking for Eric, Ken Loach knuckles down on Route Irish to the grimmer business of bringing the war in Iraq back home. There have been varyingly rigorous theatrical and televisual responses to this conflict in recent years, but Loach and regular screenwriter Paul Laverty have here plumped for an insistent righteousness that left me indifferent – at the risk of seeming glib, I started to long for Eric Cantona and his trumpet to rematerialise, just to break up a rhetoric that comes to sound altogether one-note.
Liverpudlian Fergus (Mark Womack) drifts back to his hometown to discover his best mate Frankie was killed working a private security detail on the titular stretch of road between Baghdad airport and the secure Green Zone. When he’s not brawling with bouncers or torturing himself listening to his dead pal’s desperate voicemail messages, Fergus smells a rat – and the more he digs, the more the official line is repeated, the more he becomes convinced something’s amiss. Turns out private security firms may not be entirely good for the health of Iraq. Who knew?
Route Irish is full of obvious dramatic shortcuts. The security boss’s clipped upper-class vowels are recorded to stick out like a suspiciously sore thumb amid an otherwise warm Scouse hubbub. His aide-de-camp is shown pottering about a golf course, as though no honest working man has ever had cause to pick up a nine-iron. Loach’s Manichean tendencies keep emerging in odd places, like the videoclips on Frankie’s mobile phone, one showing Iraqis enjoying cake and ice cream at a birthday party (nice), the other showing a not dissimilar family unit being riddled with bullets (not so nice).
They’re there, too, in Fergus’s well-appointed bolthole, with its coordinated black-and-white interiors – not to mention its makeshift gym-cum-waterboarding chamber, and scenic view across the Mersey. For the first time, Loach’s sense of place appears less than unimpeachable – and his casting seems to falter alongside it. Some have been distracted by the presence of comedian John Bishop in flashbacks as the doomed Frankie, but he’s the one genuine personality in the film, and a continuation of the fine Loachian tradition of casting sometime stand-ups to lend spontaneity to arguments otherwise set firmly in stone.
Besides, Womack’s unchecked ranting and thousand-yard stare prove rather greater obstacles to engagement, not least as the audience will most likely spot each narrative development – veiled as they are only by Chris Menges’ teary cinematography – from a much shorter distance. To work as polemic, Loach’s film first needed to convince as drama; but Route Irish, bull-headed yet leaden of foot, keeps stumbling into the same traps as last year’s equally well-intentioned In Our Name – and that at least had the excuse of being assembled by novices.
Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili are less a group per se than a revolving band of outsiders; a numerous travelling gang who, collectively, suggest an African Arcade Fire or Bellowhead on crutches and mobility tricycles. Raised amid the poverty of latter-day Kinshasa – their songs the stuff of polio outbreaks and sleeping on cardboard – the Staff recruit homeless youngsters to perform alongside them as backing musicians and dancers, a policy that has the consequence of turning band practice into a proposition as lively and unpredictable as their music.
Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye’s documentary portrait Benda Bilili! has a strong element of let’s-put-the-show-on-right-here as the Staff pitch up on street corners to rehearse: their energy is such that recording sessions go better outdoors than within the confines of their exasperated French producer’s studio. Indirectly, we learn something of the chaos of a city still patrolled by UN tanks, where preachers with megaphones spout forth about electoral reform on crowded trains. Truly there is no easy shelter, no quiet zone here, though the film may yet provide Nick Clegg with a few novel tips on promoting AV.
I’d have been prepared to sacrifice some of this local colour for a little more musical context, though that’s precisely the structure the Staff so delight in rejecting. The filmmaking gets conventional with the band’s departure for Europe, whether unintentionally or not asserting that SBB’s accomplishments can only be validated with the acclaim of Caucasians. The best stretches of Benda Bilili! show life rolling on regardless: as with the late cut from the tour party departing a snowy Oslo to their young protégé Roger, practising his guitar licks back in Kinshasa – a far subtler, and far more affecting, benchmark of the extent to which this music has come to make a difference.
Route Irish is in selected cinemas, and also available on demand via Film Flex and Sky Box Office; Benda Bilili! is in selected cinemas.
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