Lasse Hallström continues his slide into mediocrity with "Salmon Fishing In the Yemen". It's a film of two love stories. The first involves the semi autistic Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) falling for uptight British consultant Harriet Talbot (Emily Blunt). Preconceptions are shattered and the odd couple embrace love. All the usual Hallmark values are espoused: follow your heart, do what you love, build a life on your passions etc. This half of the film works fairly well.
The film's second love story functions as a kind of meta love story. Here the British Government constructs a public relations campaign in which it is publicly seen to be assisting a wealthy Yemeni sheik bring "salmon fishing to the Yemen" (note the condescendingly Colonialist "the" before "Yemen"). The British Government does this so as to distract the public from the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Through this meta love story, Brits, Arabs and Persians learn to find common shared values, love one another and respect the never-give-up ethos of Salmon. This half of the film is creepy. Hallstrom acknowledges the cynical forces at work constructing this spectacle of a love affair (and on one level the fishing project is genuinely wonderful), but then goes on to validate it. Yes, Arabs and Persians are "human too" and vice versa, but the point the film ignores is that they're not treated as such. And they're not treated as such because we're preoccupied with salmon, which is the very point of the salmon.
One subplot involves a sheik being persecuted by Yemeni tribal leaders because he dares bring to the desert "water and civilisation", and by implication "democracy" (the Romans "invented" democracy; their democratic states were almost 2/3rds enslaved). He brings this civilisation, of course, with the help of the white man and the British Government. The most straightforward attack on this kind of thinking came from C. L. R. James. When white governors castigated the post emancipation Caribbean islands for being "backward" and "undeveloped", James nodded his head and agreed: "You're right, can you spare fifty million white slaves for a couple hundred years so we can catch up?" The embarrassed Governors offered to lend some men. James: "Excellent, but do they come with your motivations?"
Today the British are covertly and the Americans overtly royally sodomising Yemen everyday. British involvement goes back almost a century, but became increasingly paranoid during the 1950s and 60s. During this period British officials supported and armed a monopoly of power in Yemen that was much resented by the Yemenis. Whenever the Yemenis would change or come close to changing these regimes, the UK would swat them back down. The overriding Western fear was that a progressive, republican, Arab nationalist Yemen would act as an inspiring example, cause a domino effect and so threaten other feudal sheikdoms in the region and throughout the wider Middle East. Afterall, if Yemen fell, then maybe US/UK cash-cow Saudi Arabia would fall too. Can't have that. So what did the UK do? It supported despots and tyrants, fostered covert/illegal arms deals (largely with Saudi Arabia) and set up a private mercenary force – a privatised military that is today doing the devil's work in Africa - which used terrorist tactics in Yemen to keep the people silent. Britain managed to keep Yemen violently under wraps for perhaps another 4 decades. Today, of course, you see the toppling of old regimes, and the US, UK and old Empries scrambling madly to reconcile their loss of control with their desire to control whatever new regimes pop up in their place. In their eyes, the more fanatical and psychotic the new leaders, the better: destabilisation equals profit. So we print stories of fish and salmon with one hand, to cover the throwing of bullets with the other.
5/10 – Worth one viewing.
The film's second love story functions as a kind of meta love story. Here the British Government constructs a public relations campaign in which it is publicly seen to be assisting a wealthy Yemeni sheik bring "salmon fishing to the Yemen" (note the condescendingly Colonialist "the" before "Yemen"). The British Government does this so as to distract the public from the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Through this meta love story, Brits, Arabs and Persians learn to find common shared values, love one another and respect the never-give-up ethos of Salmon. This half of the film is creepy. Hallstrom acknowledges the cynical forces at work constructing this spectacle of a love affair (and on one level the fishing project is genuinely wonderful), but then goes on to validate it. Yes, Arabs and Persians are "human too" and vice versa, but the point the film ignores is that they're not treated as such. And they're not treated as such because we're preoccupied with salmon, which is the very point of the salmon.
One subplot involves a sheik being persecuted by Yemeni tribal leaders because he dares bring to the desert "water and civilisation", and by implication "democracy" (the Romans "invented" democracy; their democratic states were almost 2/3rds enslaved). He brings this civilisation, of course, with the help of the white man and the British Government. The most straightforward attack on this kind of thinking came from C. L. R. James. When white governors castigated the post emancipation Caribbean islands for being "backward" and "undeveloped", James nodded his head and agreed: "You're right, can you spare fifty million white slaves for a couple hundred years so we can catch up?" The embarrassed Governors offered to lend some men. James: "Excellent, but do they come with your motivations?"
Today the British are covertly and the Americans overtly royally sodomising Yemen everyday. British involvement goes back almost a century, but became increasingly paranoid during the 1950s and 60s. During this period British officials supported and armed a monopoly of power in Yemen that was much resented by the Yemenis. Whenever the Yemenis would change or come close to changing these regimes, the UK would swat them back down. The overriding Western fear was that a progressive, republican, Arab nationalist Yemen would act as an inspiring example, cause a domino effect and so threaten other feudal sheikdoms in the region and throughout the wider Middle East. Afterall, if Yemen fell, then maybe US/UK cash-cow Saudi Arabia would fall too. Can't have that. So what did the UK do? It supported despots and tyrants, fostered covert/illegal arms deals (largely with Saudi Arabia) and set up a private mercenary force – a privatised military that is today doing the devil's work in Africa - which used terrorist tactics in Yemen to keep the people silent. Britain managed to keep Yemen violently under wraps for perhaps another 4 decades. Today, of course, you see the toppling of old regimes, and the US, UK and old Empries scrambling madly to reconcile their loss of control with their desire to control whatever new regimes pop up in their place. In their eyes, the more fanatical and psychotic the new leaders, the better: destabilisation equals profit. So we print stories of fish and salmon with one hand, to cover the throwing of bullets with the other.
5/10 – Worth one viewing.