the bang bang club snapshots from a hidden war

It starts when his girlfriend, Robin, reacts in revulsion as he begins staging the lighting for a shot of a grieving mother holding her dead son.įor all director Silver's attempts to simulate the experience of war photographers, he somehow manages to miss both on the wide shot and the close-up in a film that overlooks both the broader political context and the intimate psychology of his characters.

Our nominal protagonist, Greg (Phillippe in familiar, furrowed-brow, obtuse mode) is slower coming to an awareness of his blocked empathy. The shot earns Carter a Pulitzer as well, but cannot rescue him from his depressive tailspin. He heads off to the Sudan, where he takes a famous, controversial picture of a starving little girl being stalked by a vulture. When they do, nearly all the dramatic heavy-lifting is left to Canadian actor Kitsch (įriday Night Lights) as the emotionally fragile Kevin Carter.Ĭarter, who loses himself in a haze of dope each night, decides to leave South Africa. A black journalist says bitterly: 'Another whitey photographer making money off the spilled blood of Africans,' but it takes a long time before the cracks begin to show. It's cheers all around when Greg becomes the first to get Robin alone in the darkroom, and then cheers again when he lands a Pulitzer for his shot of a man doused in gasoline and lit afire before being struck down by machete. In the mornings the gang heads out in a van to photograph the latest horrors, jumping into the bloody street battles (hair-raisingly re-enacted by South African extras) between Zulu nationalists of the Inkatha Freedom Party and members of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.Īt night, the babes and booze flow freely. Soon, Greg is a member of the gang, dubbed the 'Bang-Bang Club' by a South African magazine.Īll four of them (in a bit of poetic licence) work for the same publication, under the supervision of sexy photo editor Robin (Malin Akerman). His bravado and exclusive photos earn him the respect of his peers.

('Forget the long lens,' says a fellow shutterbug, 'This stuff only looks good up close.') Later, Greg impetuously decides to follow the killers to their compound to interview them and take more pictures. The opening scene sees Phillippe, as Greg, joining a scrum of photographers snapping pictures of the corpse of a man cut down by a Zulu group in Soweto.

The bang bang club snapshots from a hidden war