| MINI-REVIEW: BUFFALO SOLDIERS Two days after it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Buffalo Soldiers became one of the least important statistics of the 9/11 atrocity. The venom of Gregor Jordan�s satire on American soldiers stagnating in West Germany weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been one of the talking points of this festival. Remarkably, it proves as entertaining as it is playfully cynical. And it�s surely the best film about peacekeeping troops since David O. Russell�s Three Kings or Danis Tanovic�s No Man�s Land. Every member of 317 Supply Battalion is in, or on the receiving end of, a black market scam. Cold War peace has turned most soldiers into heroin addicts. A drugged-up GI gets killed in a barrack room game of American football. His body is chucked out of a high window to cover up. A Chieftain tank driven by stoned soldiers goes AWOL on exercise and flattens a small market, several cars, and a local petrol station. The method is MASH. The madness is pure Python. Joaquin Phoenix is the prime fixer in this decadent, squandering mess. He is a sort of demonic Sergeant Bilko to Ed Harris�s hopeless commanding officer. The real drama kicks in when a grizzly Vietnam veteran (Scott Glenn) is drafted in to clean up the company. The predictable battle of egos between Phoenix and Glenn spins wildly out of control when Phoenix starts dating Glenn�s daughter (Anna Paquin), to annoy him, and then falls in love. Jordan injects this strange riff on Cold War boredom with a droll, dreamlike quality. Phoenix�s nightmares of falling from great heights into volcanic-looking cityscapes is a queasy mating of vertigo and fatalism. It�s an extraordinary second feature from a prodigious young talent. Taken from timesonline.co.uk |
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