Eden Court Cinema, Inverness, 21 March 2009

The Age of Stupid

IT’S NOT like other films. Having kept abreast of the climate change issue, seen The Day After Tomorrow, seen the news reports of the People’s Premiere and been following the internet chatter about this film on Facebook and Twitter, I arrived with a vague idea of what to expect. Even so, there were surprises, which I’m not going to spoil for you because everyone should see this film, whatever their thoughts about climate change.

It’s not that it has enormous artistic merit, Pete Postlethwaite notwithstanding. The production budget, raised by selling shares to 228 friends and believers, was £425,000, which is, by my calculations, approximately 1/226th of what Roland Emmerich spent on The Day After Tomorrow, the top grossing environmentalist film to date.

Even with the deepest possible discounts on licence fees by film archives and some extraordinarily resourceful animators, there is a complete – and completely understandable – lack of Hollywood gloss, which actually adds to the impact. The medium is definitely not the message here.

Director Franny Armstrong weaves together with skill diverse stories from around the world, true stories about real people being affected by climate change now (well, in the last few years). These are extracts from television documentaries, the filming of which uses techniques and equipment very different from those used in feature films. It soon becomes apparent that what packs a punch on the small screen is quite extraordinarily arresting when you see it blown up to cinema projection size.

Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud, two refugee children from Iraq; 82-year-old mountain guide Fernand Pareau, would-be medical student Layefa Malem from the Niger Delta – you leave the cinema with an enduring sense of the reality of these admirable and likeable people’s lives, counterbalanced by the saddening reality of the existence of other people, neither as likeable nor as admirable, like Jeh Wadia, the Stelios Haji-Ioannou of India, and – especially – the hateful, bullying hoorays who campaign, successfully, against a windfarm on an abandoned Bedfordshire airfield.

The microscopically low budget animations and crazy patchwork of documentary clips are linked and given a narrative structure by the peerless Pete Postlethwaite, who is perhaps the strongest reason that The Age of Stupid succeeds in its purpose; which is to make its audience think outside the box.

Most of all, Armstrong throws into sharp relief the nature of the overpoweringly short-sighted, short-termist greed that is behind the environmental degradation of this planet, this rare and lovely planet on which we are so very lucky to live.

How much longer the planet can take this degree of punishment is one of the questions The Age of Stupid poses – and answers. Whether you think climate change is happening or not; whether you think it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, fluctuations in sunspots or a wobble in the Ice Age cycle; just watch it. Please.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• The Age of Stupid