Maya Khankhoje only swallows small pills produced by Big Pharma under extreme duress

The Constant Gardener. Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on a novel by John Le Carré. Directed by Fernando Meirelles

The Constant Gardener, like the Lord of War, also happens to be a film about how the local meets the ideological (see review above) and the illicit trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, except that in this case the arms dealer is not a small-time immigrant trying to make it big, but a big pharmaceutical company engaged in covert drug testing in Africa under the guise of humanitarian work.

Early on in the film we learn that our heroine Tessa Qualye (warmly played by Rachel Weisz), a young activist married to Justin Quayle (dreamily played by Ralph Fiennes), a staid British diplomat serving in Kenya, will be found raped and murdered in a rural road, together with her chauffeur Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé) . Except that her chauffeur was not really a chauffeur but a Congolese-Belgian doctor who was both her colleague and possibly lover, and was helping her with her research on the misdoings of a big pharmaceutical company ostensibly engaged in the fight against AIDS. When Tessa is murdered, Justin wakes up from his gardening/bureaucratic stupor in order to get to the bottom of his wife’s murder and her intriguing double life. This very complex story is skilfully told in the cinematographic language of flash-backs that are also a favourite narrative device of Le Carré’s novels. The photography and sound track in this movie are also outstanding. As for the characters, unlike those in Lord of War, they are very real and very engaging.

A hauntingly poetic movie that both mesmerises as well angers the viewer.

P.S. The director could have lopped off twenty minutes of screen time with no deleterious effects.