Movie Review: The Last King of Scotland

In The Last King of Scotland, directed by Kevin Macdonald, Forest Whitaker plays a dangerously fascinating Idi Amin, the dictator responsible for 300,000 Ugandan deaths in the 1970s. This seductive tale of paranoid power, beautifully shot on location, lingers on the African Nero’s seductive and murderous entourage.

Kevin Macdonald’s stylish account of Idi Amin Dada’s dictatorship in Uganda is a fresh and sexy take on an old tale: that of a mere soldier absolutely corrupted by absolute power. But the director’s foremost accomplishment is, surprisingly, an aesthetic one.

In The Last King of Scotland, Kampala, the 40-year old capital of Uganda is as much a character as the insane dictator himself. After a few introductory scenes shot in the Ugandan countryside, MacDonald’s lens focuses exclusively on the city. Not anintuitive choice, given that Uganda is an overwhelmingly rural country, but one that parallels the dictator’s growing estrangement from his people.

Macdonald, a former documentary director, makes the city look like a tide of tin roofs, spread over red-earth hills and sprinkled with the occasional official building. The contrast with rural Africa and its mud-huts and stick-roofs is striking, a visual impression of an unfinished utopia gone wrong, much like most post-independence African political experiments. But the director performs the feat of depicting it as new, modern and almost beautiful.

Cement reigns supreme in today’s urban Africa. As anyone who has spent time in the sub-Saharan tropics in the last 40 years knows, cities often look like a 1970s James-Bond villain’s nightmare. In downtown Kampala, Nairobi, or Kinshasa, high-rise towers are made of bare, raw concrete, reminiscent on a small scale of the now-defunct New York Twin Towers. Airport terminals and hospitals are enclosed in see-through concrete wire netting. Even ministries – mostly built at independence, sometime in the early 70s – look like cheap renditions of what European architects thought was ground-breaking at the time: Le Corbusier-inspired mammoths, in which all geometry seems to revolve around lozenges.

But Macdonald’s camera captures Kampala as it was originally meant to be seen: brand-new, clean, and open to the elements. The director’s stunning use of light gives a new life to the premises. The Ugandan capital’s hospital looks like it is spacious and deliberately minimalist, instead of unfinished and unkempt.

In the tropical sun, under short but deluge-like rain seasons, suffocating traffic pollution and choking dust, buildings age ten years in a single season. Most of these constructions are independence-era relics, now varnished by a brownish coat of neglect, their walls cracked, stained, and sometimes bullet-pocked, images of Africa’s abbreviated quest for modernity.
However, MacDonald’s tale is set before this architectural and political demise. The memorable orgy-like party scene filmed in the dictator’s villa therefore makes the palace appear cozy and sophisticated, an intricate blend of updated Art Deco and tropical nature. Interiors are equally studied. The orange-to-brown tones, yellow velvet and vanilla carpets, zebra skins and other wildlife trophies create an atmosphere of domesticated jungle. Reflections of light on the praline-colored skins of Idi Amin’s feline, afro-clad mistresses perfectly render the era’s obsession with earthy colors and smooth textures.

This is a welcome departure from the urban Africa portrayed in recent films like Tsotsi, set in a South African slum, or The Constant Gardner, filmed in Nairobi’s largest shantytown. It is a refreshing reminder of how Africa wanted to look at Independence, in the 1960s. It is also a stark reflection of the continent’s failings.

Hilaire Avril