the constant gardener

John le Carré's successful book. Fernando Meirelles, who is better known as the director of "Cidade de Deus". Great acting from both Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. Splendid views. A very high IMDB ranking for a new-comer. All these things might recommend "The Constant Gardener" (2005). And the truth is that this political drama/thriller whose plot develops around a beautiful retrospective romance might actually be worth 129 minutes of one's life.

After his wife, Tessa, is brutally killed somewhere near a lake in Kenya, Justin Quayle, a British diplomat, finds himself in the position to investigate her murder all by himself. While trying to make something out of both the misterious life that his wife lived, and her misterious disappearance, Justin gets trapped in a sick political game, an international conspiracy that implies the usage of Africa as an enourmous laboratory which remourselessly performs all sorts of tests directly on humans. During his quest, Justin gains more and more trust in his dead wife and in the love that kept them together, gradually losing confidence in everybody else.

The well-paced movie is somewhat disturbing and thought-provoking. However, there is one detail which kept me from enjoying this movie at its full potential. And that would be the striking resemblance between the plot of this film and the story from the 1996 brilliant thriller "Extreme Measures", directed by Michael Apted, and starring Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman.

And another observation: for some reason (and i am really curious to find it out), the movie's title was translated into Romanian as the title of another le Carre's novel, "Absolute friends".

8/10