Sydney Film Festival (38) - Barrie Pattison reviews Danis Tanovic's Tigers

TIGERS*

Danis Tanovic

Watching Danis Tanovic’s film gives the same impression as the English language Costa Gavras movies - well guys, we knew that. Yes, the craft aspects are very good, the European players we recognize are excellent and the Indian ones that are new to us are as good or better. The subject is alarming but we had already heard about it.

Maryam d'Abo (portrait)

The film however sandbags us. WHO rep. Maryam d'Abo, looking like a gaunt version of the girl from The Living Daylights, tells us that the appalling story - Multi-nationals profiting $23 billion from selling baby formula to mothers whose own milk is better for their children, who then die in millions, has already been acted out in other continents for more than thirty years and is repeating in Pakistan.

The material we’ve been watching takes on an abrupt new urgency - the detail of buyer resistance to locally made pharmaceuticals, created by the big corporations’ bribe tactics at every level of the medical industry, his wife and father telling Emraan Hashmi that his principled stand, which is putting their lives at risk, is the only way he can retain their respect, the switch blackmail allegation, the film’s staged interview with the Nestlé (except they can’t call them that) Company, using the words of the Edward Kennedy inquiry which opened the film.

We can understand why the maker of No Man’s Land would want to do this one and can only hope that Tanovic manages to get it out to the wide audience that having a giant Bollywood star on board offers.

We are, of course, taking the film makers’ word for it but just the possibility that he’s nailed the question justifies serious attention. Can’t help wondering why we haven’t seen the other recent Tanovic films. 

*Tigers, directed by Danis Tanovic, France/India/UK, 2014, 90 minutes