Fighting terrorism with comedy
FOUR LIONS
Director: Christopher Morris
Cert. 15
A satire about UK terrorism may not be your first choice for an entertaining night at the cinema, but there’s much in controversial writer-director Chris Morris’s latest film to make Christians take a second look.
Short-listed for a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and starring Riz Ahmed, this is a film packed with surprises, not the least of which is its disarming capacity to bring both laughter and tears to the cheeks of many an unsuspecting cinema-goer. In the opening and closing scenes, we see the bombers messing up their suicide videos — and in between we watch them recruit the crow, blow up sheep, and blunder farcically from one tragicomic shenanigan to the next.
Be warned, there’s an awful lot of bad language (though a lot of it is so fast-paced it’s barely decipherable).
Out of deference to the sheer horror of the subject matter, we might not want to laugh, but in places Four Lions makes it very hard not to.
It’s a very skilfully packaged ‘humour as an antidote to fear’ product that takes something that really scares us — suicide bombing — and gives us permission to laugh at it, and thus make ourselves feel less scared.
Demos, the UK-based think-tank, recently released research that claims the way to beat terrorism is to stop it looking ‘cool’ to would-be terrorists, and if this is so, Four Lions could turn out to be a very important film. For, here, terrorism is made to look decidedly un-cool, with its home-grown Al-Qaida wannabes successfully portrayed as victims of their own perpetrated evils. It gives them lop-sided grins and slightly vacant stares, and represents them to us as something we can easily identify with: people, ordinary sinful human beings — at once endearing, bungling, misguided and manipulated. But, above all, lovable lost souls.
This, perhaps, more than anything else, explains why Four Lions has proved so popular that it’s about to be released more widely in cinemas, and why Christians, in particular, find it a deeply thought-provoking film, capable of moving to tears and to prayer, even more than to laughter. It challenges and causes us to question things like Western materialism, the failings of our multi-cultural society, and our cultural exclusivities.
I was incredibly moved by this film. My popcorn remained uneaten at the end — indeed, a fair bit of it was scattered across the floor, along with my emotions — and I left the cinema with a reawakened sense of mourning for all life that remains untouched by Christ’s love, and hugging my half-empty popcorn tub as though it were a very precious thing.
PS: Try not to fall in love with the little crow.
Cara Grant
