The Hindu Business Line : Feel human once more

FOR the love of humanity see Hotel Rwanda. After feel-good trash and well-crafted spectacles, which have been Hollywood's fare for the last few months, this movie ushers in some sensitivity back again.

Terry George's film is, however, ordinary. It sputters its way into a killing field, has few memorable frames and to the end hovers undecidedly in treatment between a documentary on Kigali's bloody chapter and a full-blown feature on the same.

What really matters is the thought you carry back from the theatre that somebody bothered to tell this true story from Rwanda's capital, which ten years ago regularly clung to the inside sheet of newspapers for its tribal conflict and then jumped to the front page when those killings bloomed into genocide.

Kigali's Hotel Mille Collines, owned by the Belgian airline Sabena, lies at the heart of the story. Its foreign manager leaves and co-worker Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), a Hutu, assumes charge. When Hutu extremists begin slaughtering Tutsis and frightened neighbours take refuge at his house, Paul asks his wife Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo), "Why do the neighbours run to us?" She replies, "You are the only Hutu they can trust."

Egged on by her, Paul rallies to protect his neighbours with that everyman's weapon of choice - money. Mille Collines, where he moves them, is soon transformed into a refuge for those fleeing the massacre.

It is a powder keg of a situation with some of the Hutu hotel staff opposed to Paul sheltering the Tutsis, a rabidly communal radio station that broadcasts instructions to kill the `cockroaches'.

And against that, Paul's tenuous protection is guaranteed by his depleting ability to bribe a Hutu general, often with items bought from a Hutu warlord, who is also the voice on the radio.

Of course, the United Nations is there but as Col. Oliver (Nick Nolte) says, "We are here as peacekeepers, not as peacemakers."

Paul captures the sense of abandonment when he tells his wife, "Col. Oliver said he has 300 UN peacekeepers for the whole country. The most he can spare for the hotel is four people and they are not even allowed to shoot."

Woven into the film's portrayal of the Rusesabaginas' attempt to protect the refugees is the relation between Paul and Tatiana — an ordinary man and a woman but with considerable inner strength.

Don Cheadle, with his heavy accent, takes some getting used to as Paul Rusesabagina. But you soon understand that ordinariness about the hero, it being precisely what Paul's story is about.

The casting - Nick Nolte as Col Oliver, Joaquin Phoenix as TV cameraman, Jack Daglish and Jean Reno as Mr Tillens, President of Sabena Airlines, are the only heavyweights - is perfect. Everybody is just what they are, no more.

Mention must be made of Sophie Okonedo as Tatiana, fragile and strong in turns and Desmond Dube as the bewildered Tutsi employee, Dube.

When Hotel Rwanda was released, some reviews had called it another Schindler's List.

It makes the category, but not the grade. You wonder if a story like Paul's could have been told to greater cinematic effect with scenes to remember and a treatment that highlighted the tightrope walk, which love in the midst of genocide is.

The film releases here on Friday.

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