Let's trick the diamond dealers into being humane

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2007)

What a rebirth indeed. Di Caprio is finally finding his way to some adult roles. He learned the trade from Scorsese and The Departed. Now he pushes it into some thickening and intensity in this film. He knows how to use his facial expressivity to mean cynicism, hatred, violence, meanness, viciousness, cruelty, etc though not yet the rising physical desire that may accept to condescend to turn into something more intense, even passionate. That's his face, and close-ups are numerous. Yet his body language does not remain that coherent and he still keeps some of his adolescent even pubescent lascivity in some attitudes and movements. He will learn, they say, provided they do not lock him up in roles of villains just the way they had locked him up in roles of smooth-skinned and practically hairless desirable adolescents, in spite of Basketball Diaries where he had quite another potential. So Leonardo Di Caprio is coming of age and may have found a completely new field of artistic expression. Yet the film was expected for a completely different reason. The mythic scandal of our modern world: the wars both for and fed by diamonds in Africa but waged by children soldiers who enrich some weapon dealers and diamond speculators with not only their blood, but also the blood of their parents shed by and with their own hands. The film is poignant because of the presence of several artists, the main black actor of course but also Emmanuel Jal and his music, who were children soldiers themselves. This film is ruthless, systematic, unavoidable in the obvious conclusion that the rich of this world need these wars to become richer. This commitment of an actor like Leonardo Di Caprio to this necessary struggle to make our world more humane, can only help millions of people to understand those wars have to stop, not be stopped by tyrannical foreign military interventions, but by negotiations, economic sanctions and sentences against those who are responsible for these unacceptable feudal if not even more primitive ambitions that can only be fulfilled by the enslavement of millions and the victimization of all those who are not members of the closed clan of power they are part of. It is good Hollywood gets aboard the train to humanistic globalization.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne