(le) mandat et (la) revendication territoriale

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le(s) corps et (la) region

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Young Guns - Depicting the violent dehumanised world of Liberian child soldiers Johnny Mad Dog shocked and compelled Cannes audiences in equal measure / Steve McQueens Hunger apart, only one film in Cannes this year absolutely took the viewer by the throat - and that is meant to sound as brutal as it does. Johnny Mad Dog in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, was one of the few films in Cannes that deserved to be argued about. It's made by French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, formerly assistant director to Gaspar Noé and the late Cyril Collard, and maker of the 2003 documentary Carlitos Medellin.

Based on Emmanuel Dongala's novel, Johnny Mad Dog deals with warfare in Africa, as conducted by a regiment of child soldiers. Johnny (Christopher Minie) is a 15-year-old who has known war almost as long as he can remember: orphaned at ten, he can't remember his previous name. Early on, we see Johnny's squadron press-ganging a boy into thier ranks, after forcing him to shoot his own father: the making of this kind of combatant becomes instantly, shocking comprehensible. Under depersonalising 'nomes de guerre' - No Good Advice, Small Devil, Nasty Plastic - these children have become war incarnate, terrorising, raping and carrying out summary executions on a a whim.

Mad Dog's campaign is counterpointed with the travails of a young girl, Laokole (Daisy Victoria Vandy), as she attempts to protect her brother and legless father. Laokole's and Johnny's paths cross once, in a amoment of quiet, magnetising tension - and from that point on, we know that the film is working towards the moment of their reunion, when surely some redemption will be at hand. Or perhaps not: the document is sufficiently open to offer hope if we're looking for it, or to suggest that once an individual has been signed up to a life of warfare, there's never a way out.

Throughout, the battle scenes are as confrontational and overwhelming as anything in recent war cinema: the fact that it's adolescents and preteens fighting suggests a hellish cross between Full Metal Jacket's urban combat sequences and Lord of the Flies. If the film comes to the UK, it can surely expect BBFC problems: much of the action concerns minors enacting scenes of intense violence.

The film will be controversial for other reasons. Sauvaire could be accused of making his subject exciting by presenting it in the hyped-up grammar of the modern war-movie. The (white) French born director could also be accused of presenting an extremely negative image of Africa as a hell on earth in which peace seems nigh-on impossible. And, given that Sauvaire has cast many real-life former child-militia members, one wonders about the humanity of having these young people re-enact horrors similar to those they must have seen and participated in themselves.

Johnny Mad Dog was shot in Liberia, although the country in the film is never named as such, and the production was supported by the current Liberian government, a representative of which appeared on stage with Sauvaire and producer Matthieu Kassovitz to pledge support for a film that, he claimed, showed that a new peaceful order had begun in this country. Rather than a sensationalist war epic, Johnny Mad Dog can be seen as an exorcism, and a more authentic ground-level evocation of Liberia's travails than that represented by, say Andrew Niccol's big-budget Lord of War, which used the country as a backdrop for its arms-trade satire. It's also arguable (although one would like to hear Sauvaire's comments) that making the film might have helped its young cast owrk through their own traumas.

But the count of action-movie sensationalism can certainly be discounted. Immersive as the film is, the effect of the editing style, brutally fractured in certain sequences, and of Marc Koninckx's often surreal images is at once to assault us and partly to numb us: to normalise the level of intensity at which the young soldiers live, to make us experience their brutality from a state of horrified yet hypnotised detachment. The effect is, on one hand, to give the film an abstract, parable-like quality, making it a universal comment on war, rather than strictly an account of Liberia's troubles. The detachment is repeatedly undermined, so that we are continually and abruptly reminded that these really are children that we're watching - and that it is adults, in governments and in the military, who have robbed them of their childhood.

/ By Jonathan Romney. This article originally appeared in Sight & Sound, July 2008.

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