Parallel projection – Frank McNally on watching Gladiator II and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat back-to-back

On successive visits to the cinema recently, by weird coincidence, I saw two films on the theme of extreme violence, European imperialism, and the exploitation of Africa, in both of which young Irishmen played unlikely heroic roles.
The similarities between Gladiator II and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat are otherwise slight, it must be said.
I quite enjoyed the former, but only after switching my phone and critical faculties to silent for the duration. This stopped me Googling, mid-movie, whether the ancient Romans really had sharks swimming in the Colosseum (no), or whether gladiators could have ridden on the backs of charging rhinoceroses (maybe).
Annoyingly, I somehow missed the scene where a Roman nobleman reads a newspaper in a café. Was he poring over the sports pages? Or the review section? (“The newspapers were right. Blood was general, all over the arena”)?
Either way, I can’t help approving of that anachronism. Any evidence of the continued relevance of print media is welcome, as far as I’m concerned, even when backdated to 1,400 years before newspapers were invented.
In other news, it was reassuring to see Paul Mescal fill the space vacated by Russell Crowe while still looking like a more-or-less average Irishman. All we need is sympathetic lighting, really.
As for Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, calling Conor Cruise O’Brien “young” in the context of the events portrayed might, I suppose, be an overstatement: he was 43 at the time. “Heroic” may be controversial too.
In a previous film about Irish involvement in the Congo crisis of 1960, The Siege of Jadotville (2016), O’Brien was portrayed as a self-preserving pantomime villain. But in this new Belgian documentary, the then UN head of mission in the Congo also gets sympathetic lighting, at least in comparison with those around him, and benefits accordingly.
The film foregrounds jazz music as both accompaniment and accomplice (touring musicians were used as propaganda, even sometimes decoys, by the US) in the dark deeds of the period. This makes for a lot of irony, in which the awfulness of what’s happening hides under saxophone riffs and drum solos.
It falls to O’Brien, recorded in subsequent interviews but also channelled by his son Patrick in readings from the memoir To Katanga and Back, to provide a moral narrative: filling in the details – ranging from incompetence to evil – about how western powers conspired to thwart Congolese independence and condemn the country’s first legitimate prime minister to death.
O’Brien’s is not the only Irish voice in the documentary, although the other one goes unbilled.
Beside the hapless Dag Hammarskjold at the stormy UN general assemblies, struggling to keep order amid the objections of a shoe-wielding Nikita Khrushchev and others, is a chairman with unmistakably Patrician-Irish tones. I had to look him up to be reminded this was Frederick Boland, our ambassador to the UN then, now perhaps best known as father of the poet Eavan.
One other minor revelation of the film was how much the young Fidel Castro – in his broth-of-a-revolutionary-boy phase – reminded me of someone I knew. Then it hit me. He and Liam Neeson at a similar vintage could have been twins.
The violence of Gladiator, despite Hollywood’s best attempts at realism, is the kind designed for eating popcorn to. The violence in Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, despite being heavily edited or detailed only in narration, retains the capacity to shock.
It is claimed at one point, for example, that photojournalists covering the Belgian war against pro-independence forces could “buy” a live execution for €500. This is accompanied by footage before and after the shooting of a Congolese rebel, which was used by the Italian director Gualtiero Jacopetti.
A pioneer of “shockumentary” film making, Jacopetti was later charged with murder back in Italy for allegedly staging such scenes but acquitted. Even so, the critic Roger Ebert, called his Africa Addio (“Goodbye Africa”) “brutal, dishonest, and racist”.
Then there is a voice-over in which a man described as a South African mercenary – although speaking with a strong Scottish accent – cheerfully defends his job of killing men, women, and children for money.
It was “the Belgians’ idea,” he says, but he doesn’t mind because his victims are “cannibals”, not “normal people”. There was no comparison, he implied, with “shooting Irishmen or Germans”.
However “well done” it might be, the violence of Gladiator is anaesthetised by the passage of two millennia since the events depicted.
With the Congo, by contrast, we can’t even console ourselves that 60 years have elapsed.
Back then, it was the country’s rich uranium deposits that made it a pawn in the Cold War.
But wealth in other minerals, notably cobalt – as used in batteries – has made war, corruption, and “modern-day slavery” a near constant in the decades since.
Towards the end of the two-and-a-half-hour documentary comes a disconcerting moment where the action seems to have cut to a commercial break, advertising iPhones. Then you realise that no, this is still part of the story. Cue a guilty moment when, soon afterwards, you turn your own phone back on.