Ciro Guerra’s film of J.M. Coetzee’s novel is grave, handsome and carried almost entirely by Mark Rylance. It is also so careful to be a parable that it forgets to be a story, and 112 minutes is a long time to watch one point being made.
Ciro Guerra has filmed J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel faithfully: an outpost at the edge of an Empire that is never named, a mild Magistrate who has kept the peace for decades, and a Colonel from the capital who arrives to find an enemy and, finding none, makes one. It is a story about how torture produces the thing it claims to be looking for, and the film understands this. What it does not understand is how to make us feel the days pass rather than count them. Waiting for the Barbarians is sombre, well made and largely inert, and Mark Rylance is the reason to sit through it.
Rylance plays the Magistrate as a man who has been comfortable so long he has come to think of comfort as decency. He potters among the ruins outside the walls, greets Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp) with the courtesy of a host who assumes the guest will be gone by the weekend, and only slowly notices what is being done in his name. His best work is in the pauses: the half-smile that dies when he hears what happened in the granary overnight, the way he keeps washing his hands once the Girl (Gana Bayarsaikhan) is in his rooms. It is a good performance built from small failures of nerve.
Depp is better than we expected. Joll’s dark glasses are a novelty at the frontier, and he explains them to the Magistrate with the patience of a man describing a spoon. He says that pain is the only reliable route to truth and then goes off to demonstrate it, and Depp plays the certainty without a flicker of enjoyment, which is what makes it frightening. Robert Pattinson arrives in the second half as Officer Mandel, a cruder instrument of the same policy, and is nasty and effective in about four scenes. Greta Scacchi has almost nothing to do as Mai and does it warmly.
Chris Menges shoots the town in ochre and shadow and the desert as a flat white glare that hurts to look at, which is presumably why Joll brought the glasses. The frame is wide and the people in it are small; when the Magistrate’s party crosses the salt flats the riders look like insects on a plate. Crispian Sallis builds the settlement from mud brick and timber, with a granary that becomes a prison. Carlo Poggioli puts the Empire in black uniforms from no century in particular and the Magistrate in cream linen that gets dirtier as he does. Giampiero Ambrosi’s score is low and sparse and stays out of the way.
When Guerra does show what Joll’s men do, he holds the shot and does not cut away, and the crowd watching includes children. We found we were watching the children rather than the soldiers, and it horrified us. That is the film working as Coetzee meant it to. It is also nearly the only time it does.
The trouble is pace, and it belongs to Jacopo Quadri’s cut as much as to Guerra. Scenes run past their point. The film has said everything it has to say by the end of the first hour, and the second hour says it again more quietly. The Magistrate’s relationship with the Girl is a series of polite washings, and Bayarsaikhan is given so little to say that the film seems to be hoping we will mistake her silence for depth. We began the evening sombre and ended it restless, and then annoyed that a story about complicity had let its hero off so gently.
Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) and Birds of Passage (2018) were about the same subject, and they were full of particular places and particular faces. Coetzee left his Empire unnamed because he wanted it to stand for every empire, and on the page the prose does the specifying for him. On screen the town plays as a set and the soldiers as a costume department.
See it for Rylance and for Menges’s desert. It runs 112 minutes and carries a 15. Watch it at home, where the slowness looks more like patience, and expect to have made up your mind about it some time before the film has.
