A review of the
film Mr. Pip
The
Papua New Guinean soldier wants to know who Mr. Pip is. His men round up the
villagers who are then severely interrogated. A little boy, as slow a learner
as Mr. Watts is (for that is Mr. Pip’s real name), says he knows where Mr. Pip
is. The boy points out a house and a white man is brought forward. The white
man soon realizes the dilemma of fiction and discursive information and in the
process of differentiating the two for the benefit of the soldier and his men,
he, the soldier, shoots him twice on the chest, calling him a liar and a spy. His
body is then dragged to the back of a house and hacked to pieces. To the
soldier Mr. Pip is never that fictitious character from Charles Dickens’ novel,
Great Expectations, but a master-mind controlling the BRA. The soldier’s next
task is to find Mr. Charles Dickens himself and similarly execute him.
Or
so goes the story of this film, Mr. Pip.
When
Lloyd Jones set out to publish the novel Mister Pip in 2006, he probably had in
mind the Bougainville copper mine as not only the largest mine in the world in
1988 but also a complex multi-billion dollar corporation from which much would
be expected, all at the expense of the ordinary Bougainville islander and those
that came to live on that island. Schools and other government service agencies
on the island were shut down, the people had nowhere to turn to but unto
themselves for all possible means of survival as just a few meters next to them
was a war raging between the BRA and the Papua New Guinea armed forces. But it
was to the people themselves that all bruises and trauma of that war were left,
with so many desolate hours of “great expectations” lying ahead of them somewhere
in the distance of an unseen future. And the resultant revelation for all of
that would be nothing but an abandoned crater, a hole in the ground not worth
fighting for.
The
journalist Sean Dorney looked at Bougainville and offered extensive reports over
ABC and other media publications of atrocities on the island and for which he
was threatened or deported.
But
this film, Mr. Pip, needs to be understood not so much as a report on what
happened on Bougainville as to its insistence on asking some of the greatest
questions of literary merit since time immemorial, especially on the plight of
ordinary people in extremely difficult circumstances. Miss Xzannjah Matsi and
Hugh Laurie join forces to give not only Bougainville but also the whole of
Papua New Guinea the best of performances since Abert Toro’s Tukana and the
William Takaku-Pearce Brosnan portrayal of Man Friday. The casting was
excellent and the use of organic material in the form of raw village talent
deserves commendation. Who can judge between character and real life? Who can
boast of who’s who in Hollywood or Bollywood but a remarkable piece of literary
rendering of ordinary humanity on film, the big silver screen, like this one?
There, and only then, do we hear voices of the masters, like Charles Dickens;
like Mr. Watts aka Mr. Pip; and that little Buka girl that snaps out of a
reverie, out of the strangeness of a long dream just to learn from the wisdom
of the crabs and Mr. Dickens that home is where we all want to be and certainly
not a thing to be ashamed of. Mr. Pip, the only white man in that village
perishes. The other villagers, including Matilda, barely manage to escape. And
when they do, there is much to look back to as reminder. In essence, the civil
war was utterly senseless.
The
film also carries some historical references, through dialogue, character flash
backs and certain locations of filming, that trace and reflect upon those
famous yet now forgotten black birding voyages of the 18th and 19th
centuries. The island of Bougainville has once upon a time been a gold mine of
black slavery. Not a single 19th century British novel, be it
Dickens or Jane Austen, passes by us without a slight mention of slave trade
whether from Africa or anywhere else such as the Pacific islands. Both the
author of the novel and the film makers have been careful enough to remain
faithful to their historical research data, by sparing us a little of that
information. In this film, Mr. Pip, in particular, we are given the opportunity
to trace those black birding voyages, when Matilda (the character Xzannjah’s
portraying) makes her way from Bougainville to the Solomon Islands, to
Australia and finally to Great Britain where she inherits part of a house that
belongs to Mr. Pip. Matilda, of course, turns down the offer when she remembers
she could not, much as she might have, save Mr. Pip from the PNG soldiers. She
inherits rather a copy of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.
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