Film of the week
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 25, 2009
Rating: 2.5/5 CALL + RESPONSE(M, 89 minutes). On general releaseOnly 2 stars? So Call + Response isn't really worth seeing? For me, star ratings are meant to provide a shorthand measure of a film's quality. Elephant stamps could do the job, but stars somehow look better on the page. However, when films like this come along, they're irrelevant. Singer/songwriter Justin Dillon's documentary about people trafficking isn't especially well-made, but it's a film everyone needs to see and it certainly grabs your attention.A mishmash of conventional documentary material, including some chilling footage shot with a hidden camera in a Cambodian child brothel, celebrity interviews and songs performed on sound stages (by Dillon, Moby, Matisyahu and many others), it draws attention to horrifying crimes against humanity, and what actress Julia Ormond describes as "the dark underside of globalisation".In the process, it joins forces with a constantly expanding body of work dealing with the subject, including Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever (2002), the telemovie Human Trafficking (2005), Trade (2007) and Taken (2008), as well as The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second part of the late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy.What makes Call + Response different, though, is that it's not just another reminder that the world is a dangerous place for the unwitting or unfortunate. In the noble tradition of agitprop filmmaking €” a tradition that stretches from the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov in Russia in the 1920s to Michael Moore and films such as Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004) and the forthcoming Food, Inc. €” it's also a call to arms. To what the film describes as "open source activism".Pitched at a part of the audience that might not read the newspapers or watch serious current-affairs programs on television, it's designed to make you angry. And it will, presenting countless stories of young women who have been tricked into prostitution by the dreams of better lives and the promise of jobs across national borders, and of children in cities and villages in the Third World who have been abducted and forced to become soldiers or sex slaves.But it's also designed to persuade viewers to transform their outrage into action, and it explains the kind of pressure that can make authorities put human trafficking in the too-hard basket rather than think twice about their equivocations. There's even a website €” always a dead giveaway of agitprop intentions €” to guide our involvement: CallandResponse.com.The film argues that we need to move outside the perceived constraints of our everyday lives to become activists in "a 21st-century abolitionist movement"."Each individual has the spiritual responsibility of cultivating their indignation," says actress Ashley Judd. "Of tapping into their rage and then allowing it to be converted into compassionate action."By way of example, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof recounts how he found himself doing just that in Cambodia, explaining why his human impulses had to take precedence over the professional detachment that customarily rules news-gathering. Daryl Hannah goes undercover to rescue exploited children from their captors. Ormond and Judd lend their celebrity status and their rage to the cause. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others contribute their tuppence worth.Alongside them, eccentric music historian Dr Cornel West provides a rationale for the film's use of popular music, identifying how the blues has given a voice to the oppressed. Later, footage of Civil Rights marchers wielding a "We Shall Overcome" banner accompanies Dillon's musing that winning this hearts-and-minds war can be as simple as having "a better song". Call + Response might not be an especially accomplished film, but it makes a potent case and packs a powerful punch.
© 2009 The Sunday Age
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