The Whistleblower

Some great performances mark this drama on UN complicity in human trafficking

There are two stories here. The first one is about Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who agrees to a short UN assignment in Sarajevo and is horrified by what she sees there. The second is a political story about UN and US complicity in human trafficking—“the whores of war”, as one character brutally describes it. Both accounts are well told, cast and acted.

But the problem is that the two narratives do not gel. The Bolkovac story is about an American professional who arrives in the aftermath of an ethnic conflict that has so debased human values that each community regards the other as objects to be traded. The UN keeps the political peace and refuses to police what they dismiss as a domestic issue—the sex slave trade in which US contract business is involved.

With her small-town naivete, Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) blows the whistle, but the girls are too scared to testify and superior officers order her to lay off. She refuses, and this tale set in a cold, grey country and about the reckless determination of a policewoman on edge, like a holocaust film, is shot in colour, but set in dull, depressing, grimy interiors and peopled by hard and emotionless faces.

This is 90 per cent of the film and we never, except in a BBC interview, cut to the larger picture of the outside world, which is of course from where UN politics operates. In this sense, the movie is unlike No Man’s Land, set in the same war and about the same UN refusal to protect the innocent when vested interests are involved. Unlike that 2001 film, The Whistleblower’s script does not synchronise the personal and the political. Individual performances are striking—Weisz is at her best, and Vanessa Redgrave, with her exquisite English intonation playing the lone voice of sanity in a compromised world, is priceless—but the film does not hold much impact.

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Ajit Duara