Direction: Kevin Macdonald Cast: Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zachary Levi Original title: The Mauritanian Country: United Kingdom Year: 2021 Release date: 3-19-2021 Genre: Drama Script: Rory Haines, Sohrab Noshirvani, MB Traven (novel by Mohamedou Ould Slahi) Photography: Alwin H. Kuchler Synopsis: The story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Guantanamo survivor locked up for more than a decade without charge or trial.
For activists of the most necessary political and judicial drama of denunciation.
As soon as his filmography is analyzed, Kevin Macdonald is interested in stories about deception and how processes (via crucis: the martyrology, clearly religious, suffered by Mohamedou Ould Slahi in The Mauritanian) of extreme dehumanization end up taking humanity out of vitiated pits. their characters. More than the motherly and upright defenders that Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley embody (splendidly), the key character of the plot is the military man played (no less inspiringly) by Benedict Cumberbatch. He is the one who will attend the progressive and painful, even more than the (graphic, biblical) torture and humiliation suffered in Guantánamo by the false culprit, assumption of the formulaic and icy inhumanity of the army, his country and the entelechy of democracy.
More than the cloistering game of the cinematographic formats used by the director inside and outside the cell, it is in Cumberbatch’s close-ups analogous to those of Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory (S. Kubrick, 1957) that what he denounces hurts us , portrays us.
