Gabriel Range’s film about a Sudanese woman kept as a domestic slave in London is lean, well shot and held together by Wunmi Mosaku. It is also so determined to be clear that it leaves us almost nothing to work out for ourselves.
Gabriel Range’s film opens in the Nuba Mountains, where Malia is a child with a father, and it ends in London, where she is a grown woman in somebody else’s house. Between those two places it has 82 minutes, and that is both its discipline and its problem. I Am Slave, inspired by the account of Mende Nazer, is spare, handsome and carried by a lead performance of real weight. It is also so anxious to be understood that it explains what it has already shown. It is a decent film about an appalling thing, and we wanted it to be a harder one.
Wunmi Mosaku plays Malia as a woman who has learned to take up as little room as possible. She keeps her eyes down, answers in a word, and folds laundry with the care of someone who knows what a crease will cost her. The performance is nearly all in the body: the way she flinches at a raised voice from another room, the way she stands in a London street with a bag of shopping and cannot make her feet go anywhere but back. When she is finally given a line that says what she feels, it is less than her face had already told us. Mosaku is the reason to watch, and the film knows it, and leans on her.
Isaach de Bankolé is the second engine, as Bah, the father who refuses to stop looking. His scenes in Khartoum are quiet, mostly a man walking into rooms and asking a question, and de Bankolé plays him with a patience that is close to stubbornness. Brand Thumim cuts between father and daughter so that each strand answers the other: she is told she has no family, and we are shown her family. It is a simple device and it works, though Bah is written as a search rather than a person, and we learn almost nothing about him except that he loves her.
Robbie Ryan shoots the two countries as two different films. The Nuba scenes are wide and hot, red earth and white light and children running through it; London is grey, close and seen mostly through glass, so that Malia is forever framed by a window she is on the wrong side of. Cristina Casali designs Haleema’s house as pale carpet and expensive nothing, and that is right: it is not a cellar, it is a comfortable home in which somebody is property. Harry Escott and Molly Nyman’s score stays low, strings mostly, and has the sense not to tell us how to feel when a door closes.
The trouble is the script. Jeremy Brock, who wrote The Last King of Scotland, builds the mechanism of Malia’s captivity out of a confiscated passport and a threat to her family, states it once, and then expects it to do all the work. It cannot. Lubna Azabal’s Haleema is given cruelty and nothing underneath it, no fear, no need, no history, and Azabal does what she can with a woman who exists to be unkind on cue. Nonso Anozie’s Musa, a Sudanese man Malia meets outside the house, arrives when the plot needs him and says what the plot needs said. Nobody in London is allowed to be more than their function.
There is one stretch we will not forget. Haleema gives Malia the day’s orders in the hall, a few feet from the open front door, with the street visible beyond it, and then goes upstairs. Malia looks at the door. We were angry, properly angry, in the way the film intends, and then we were angry at the film for how quickly it cut away, as if afraid we might not have got the point. We had. Range made Death of a President in 2006 and was accused of recklessness; here he has gone the other way and is cautious to a fault.
Dirty Pretty Things found a thriller inside the same London of unseen workers and took the time to make its villains people. I Am Slave has the better lead and the worse script, and at 82 minutes it ends just as it has started to earn its second half. See it for Mosaku, who deserves a bigger film and will presumably get one, and for Ryan’s two Sudans. Do not expect it to argue with you; it has made up its mind, and it is right, and that turns out not to be quite enough.
