Unarmed. To the trouble of the orphaned Martin, he did not have any other relatives, except his father, who disappeared in the African savannah, who was remembered by neighbors who buried his mother, who cold-bloodedly sent a city child to wild people from wild places, surrounded by wild nature and wild morals, where someone will surely eat someone.
French director Patrick Granperret, together with his assistant screenwriters, discover before us the genetic connection of his film with Jules Verne adventure themes, translating them into a more mundane and modern knowledge gained through personal experience and dangerous extremes.
The adventures of thirteen-year-old Martin, of course, more modest than those described by the great novelist. But he is not a fifteen-year-old captain, but a barely grown child, forced to forge new connections, peering into the surrounding new world of black bodies and dark thoughts, faithful friends and deceitful liars, taking the side of the former and resisting the latter, making decisions on their own. Too brave. Otherwise you won't survive.
Condensing naivety, cinema becomes semi-fairytale, while preserving historical, cultural, ethnographic and pedagogical motifs, revealed in the traditions and ritual actions of the native people, in the friendship of the white man with the Aboriginal guys, Victor and Fafana, whose names reflect the past and present of these colonial places.
One keeps a family secret, and the other, driven away, turned into a petty merchant, but each of them opens his side of the good to the friend, becoming on which they together try to solve a difficult task, where many things unknown and unknown are enough, clutching at steel.
There are scoundrels and scoundrels, a lot of obstacles, and children think they can walk. To the truth and to the missing elephants. For the most part, by a miracle, as in the night crossing of a dirty river infested with crocodiles, where, having made a ritual act, a brave couple of travelers boldly go naked (the product is fully ready for use) or thanks to the sluggishness of their opponents, who, playing along with their bosom friends, are happy to put a leg by a quirky director who seeks to find a measure of the separation of black and white, the color of bodies and color of actions, bringing them slowly to the tragic line.
No, there is no need to talk about “high-sounding”, but it is impossible to miss the serious intentions with which Granperre introduces signs of political tension and ethnic anxiety into his picture, probably one of the first to recall the then still fresh nightmare of the Rwandan massacre, while still vaguely reproaching Europeans, without knowing for what.
A poor director of inexpensive action, a director with all-conquering optimism indulges in the children’s joys of exciting adventures, where the discoveries of the bitter truth drown out the joy of a happy victory, a small fortune, opening the door to a lost world.