Production between Bollywood and Hollywood, The Price of Truth is a biopic about the turbulent life of Australian missionary Graham Staines in the heart of India. What is the value of this feature film just released in physical format? The answer below...
Film alms
At the end of the 1990s, in the heart of India: Manav (Sharman Joshi), a journalist, is entrusted with the task of investigating a certain Graham Staines (Stephen Baldwin). Indeed, this Australian missionary is accused of offering charity against the conversion to Christianity of the people he helps. Manav accepts this position and is about to make some heartbreaking discoveries that will undermine his own convictions...
The Price of Truth is the biopic of Graham Staines, this missionary burned alive with his children in 1999 by fundamentalists. If the story obviously touches, the film unfortunately finds itself coated with a Christian morale that it is difficult to ignore. Between his Indian director Aneesh Daniel which places his cinema under a biblical quote (see below) and Stephen Andrew Baldwin in the role of Staines (who shot in Usual suspects but who also claims to be a fervent Christian evangelist), one obviously feels in what ideological bath soaks The Price of Truth.
« Tell the Lord your works and your projects will succeed »
And then, you'd tell me... It is not because one does not share the dominant ideology of the author that the work cannot be exciting? And you'd be right, because we could blame the same people for the exciting George Bernanos in literature, for example (sound Journal of a country priest inspired Pialat for the Master Under Satan's Sun). Except that if ideology actually transpires from feature film, this is not his only problem.
Bald film
Between the Bollywood production kitsch and the United States, The Price of Truth skate. Painful overplay, over-pressed music, characters lacking flesh to which one never really attaches... Even the informative aspect of the painting of the religious conflict (forcingly partial in view of the ideological hue of production) therefore had very little interest.
Worse still, the almost two hours of film are felt and do not help to appreciate a feature film that is rather banal. Let us keep for his benefit the director's desire to stick as closely as possible to the historical reality of Staines' life: he invests in the very places where he acted for his filming and strives to capture the tangible reality of the place and its local population. A very meagre consolation with a film that works more to transmit its ideology than any visual or narrative emotion. Too bad.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher : SAJE Distribution
Duration: 106 min
Release Date: 06 September 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 2.35
Soundtrack : English and French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
Subscribe
Connection
0 Remarks
oldest
