Director: Rachid Bouchareb
Screenplay: Rachid Bouchareb, Zoé Galeron, Olivier Lorelle
Producers: Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat, Matthieu de Braconier, Bertrand Faivre
Starring: Brenda Blethyn, Sotigui Kouyaté
Year: 2009
Country: Algeria/UK/France
Running time: 87min.

(3/5)

On July 7, 2005, a group of four Muslim men detonated homemade bombs throughout the busy London public transit system (three on the underground, one on a bus in Tavistock Square), killing 56 people and injuring some 700 more. Even from my cosy, unthreatened home in the central United States, the attack was alarming, and I remember spending all day contacting everyone I knew in Britain (most of whom didn’t even live in London) to make sure they and their families were all right. London River seeks to bring all that apprehension back, focusing on a rural British mother and an Algerian man, both seeking their London-dwelling children after they are unable to reach them after the attacks.

Brenda Blethyn is very solid as the mother Elizabeth, who struggles as much with her innate racism and fear of outsiders as she does with worry of her daughter’s disappearance. The film takes its time setting up her leisurely-paced country life, filled with tending to her home and garden, feeding her donkeys, and walking through the fields of her home – all activities she clearly treasures. The bustle of London is itself a culture shock, but when she discovers her daughter’s apartment is in an area of London with large Middle Eastern and North African population, she’s instantly and obviously much more uncomfortable. Yet Blethyn plays her with a lot of subtlety – her racism isn’t outright hatred, but mostly inexperience with those who are different than herself, and a sort of underlying imperialism that leads her to treat others with kindness but condescension.

So when her flyer looking for information about her daughter is answered by Ousmane, a French-speaking black Algerian looking for his estranged son in the aftermath of the attacks. He has a photo of his son with her daughter taken at an Arabic class at the local mosque. She’s initially unable to accept that her daughter would be learning Arabic or hanging out with Muslims, but eventually she must and after some tension, she and Ousmane become uneasy friends, brought together by mutual grief and fear. In fact, they are very much alike in personality; Ousmane is also a man of nature, caring for trees in his adopted French home. This contrast between nature and city is a narrative thread tying the two of them together while simultaneously separating them from the children whom they don’t know quite as well as they thought.

I do wish, though, that they’d developed Ousmane’s character a little more, as they did Elizabeth’s. We have a much more solid sense of her internal struggles and the prejudice she has to overcome to accept Ousmane’s help and presence in her life; there’s no equivalent on Ousmane’s side. He simply accepts quietly whatever she throws at him, basically staying far too passive for us to feel whatever’s going on in his head.

It’s a decent little film with good performances by both Blethyn and Kouyaté, focusing more on the effects of being thrown into unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations by tragic events rather than the tragic events themselves, though the absence of the children is a fairly constant presence. There are a lot of good scenes and vignettes, but the final outcome is pretty predictable and not particularly insightful. It’s well-made, but not terribly memorable.