“Man of Honor”: Liability and Responsibility in John McDonagh’s film The Forgiven (2022)

Padmaja Challakere

“Tragedy is not about human justice. Tragedy is the statement of an expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement organized by the knaves for the fools.”

                                    Introduction, Anne Carson’s Translation of Euripides’ Hekabe

“Good dialogue, whatever the characters are, is attractive. You hear the crackle of something that has a bite, a dramatic punch, and that’s what the script had. It was the writing! The role had an arc.”

                                    Ralph Fiennes in an interview about McDonagh’s The Forgiven

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ohn McDonagh’s film The Forgiven (2022) belongs, at first glance, to the genre of the visually artful films set in Morocco, a slice cut from the timeless Sahara Desert movies like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient where all human action turns into the boundless immensity of the Sahara Desert against which our hero recognizes the truth of suffering or loneliness or love’s passion or meaninglessness as he is tortured by heat, flies, dysentery, and disease. John McDonagh’s The Forgiven is a dark film, a film-noir. But it also has the drama, suspense, and visual artistry of art-house cinema, and is an homage to Bertolucci and Antonioni. In its very opening establishing shot we see a very long shot of a ship on the Mediterranean approaching a landscape studded with blue-colored houses: “L’ Afrique.” On the deck, we see a well-dressed, middle-aged, affluent couple who look bored, if not estranged: he is drinking, she is reading Andre Gide’s The Moralist. And as Bertolucci describes his characters, Kit and Port, in The Sheltering Sky, “they love each other but they know they are not going to succeed ever again in being happy together.”

Of The Forgiven, John McDonagh says in an interview: “I am incredibly proud of this film-it has every element: dialogue, performance, production design, visual artistry, costumes. The film, based on Lawrence Osborne’s novel The Forgiven (2012), is by no means just an example to the type of Sahara movies, as the screenplay, counter-pointed shots, and the particularly strong performances by Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Ismail Kanater, and Matt Smith make evident.

The human actions in The Forgiven (2022) are not pitted against endless expanse of the desert. Rather, this film is rich in languages, semantically complex on both sides, not only human and non-human but also post-colonial Maghreb and Western. Hamid (played by Maroud Zouri), Richard’s Moroccan valet, gets many of the point-of-view shots, and his proverbs and one-liners frame the opposing
worlds of the partying foreigners as well as the Berbers, the indigenous people of Morocco (the descendants of the pre-historic Caspian culture of North Africa).

The language of McDonagh’s The Forgiven (2022) is pervaded by a kind of irony that is Socratic. No obvious or positive doctrine of ethics is put forth. Rather, what we assume about the correlation between ethical relation and the content of our attitudes, and our vocabularies is audited or undercut.

The film asks: What are the rules or the norms of truth that make us determine what we make ourselves responsible for? How is recognition or ‘knowing’ different from ‘knowledge of’, and what does it look like across a gulf? The film may be said to be on the side “of human norms, the Universals (recognition, responsibility, intentionality) which, according to philosopher Robert Brandom, “we have relinquished in favor of attitudes and vocabularies.” Brandom argues that no prescribed attitudes or socio-political vocabularies are of any help in recognizing “how to act with intention and responsibility.

David Henninger, a British doctor (played by Ralph Fiennes) and his wife, Joanne (played by Jessica Chastain), an American writer of children’s books, are not here to wander the desert. They have arrived in Tangiers and will drive 400 miles to Azna to attend “a little soiree in the desert, a party hosted by Jo’s incredibly rich friends-a gay couple-Richard Galloway and Dally, who throw “the best parties, not just in Marrakesh, but in all of North Africa.” A kind of party that Kings would envy. A no-expense-spared party! For which extensive preparations have been made.

“A long way to drive for a party,” David complains as they drive towards Azna. They are arguing about the turn-off to Azna when suddenly something terrible happens. As we know, from Oedipus onwards, the unprecedented event occurs always at the crossroads.

A young Berber boy, who we have seen sniffing glue with his friend and wondering about how to get out of this life of constantly hammering at fossils for a livelihood, steps out on to the road, a stolen pistol on the ready, hoping to sell a stolen fossil. But the car, driven by David, does not slowdown in time and runs over the boy.

Driss Taheri will now never be able to go to Casablanca with his friend or grow up. David Henninger, our protagonist, has killed a young boy, who the police describe as a “fossil-seller, not far from here.” David has killed, and Jo, as he reminds her, is an accessory in this crime, but she does not see herself as complicit. When asked by the French guest at the party: “What do you call this in the US,” the cynical, dislikeable Tom Payton, the American financial analyst, says: “A Roadkill!”

When the Henningers arrive at Richard’s villa with a dead-body in the backseat, Richard (played by Matt Smith), the host, manages with his shrewd charm, to get the police-officer to show up and get the case registered as “accidental death.”

The police go away. And it seems like a victory. But the next morning, the boy’s grieving father, Abdellah Taheri (played by the Ismael Kanater) shows up at the gate, kneels in the sand in supplication, saying he wants to come inside and collect his son’s body. Hamid does not want Richard to open the gate because, they are, he says “Berbers,” the Kabyles, who will extort money from you.” The father, Abdellah Taheri, is broken, furious.

David greets Abdellah with courtesy. But when he is told that Abdellah wants him to travel back with him to his home village to bury his son’s body, David refuses. To Hamid, the Arab servant, who is translating between them, David says, “Bollocks! I am not going to travel to his village because he thinks I knocked off his boy. He could be ISIS, for all I know.” Hamid, who has been keeping vigil by the body all night, says sharply: “The boy’s name was Driss.” Hamid, like a servant in Greek tragedy is telling David, “This one here is dead, and you do not bewail him? (from Anne Carson’s translation of Eurpides, Hekabe). David registers this and looks at the corpse of a young boy, gone before his time.

David agrees to go with Abdellah to their village. The scene in which the fireworks accidently go off when Driss’s body is being carried out of the villa reveals the indifference of the party guests to death of this young boy. Even the Moroccan filmmaker who is making a film about “nomads” remains inside, partying. The disgrace of it is reflected in Abdellah’s face.

The film, from this point on, shifts between the exoticized party at the castle and the journey of these adversaries-the guilty David and the crazed-with-grief Abdellah- to the village across the desert, counterpointing these opposing worlds. David’s journey towards expiation is made possible precisely because he is direct. David’s unpleasantness is both the technique and tone of this film. David does not do semantic niceties. He is, what we call, “offensive.” He does not call servants, “the staff.” Deliberately stepping along the diamond pattern on the beautiful maroon Moroccan carpet, which is everywhere, David says, “I hate this ethnic pretense and affectation; we can treat people decently without rolling their carpets everywhere!” His “historical” take on the Edwardian tradition of pederasty and the motivation of the writers for their journey to North Africa practically causes an aneurism in one of the party-guests who responds by calling him a “real shit-stirrer.”

David stays away from socially prescribed vocabularies; nor does he guess the attitudes of others when he is speaking. Rules, to him, determine what we make ourselves responsible for, what we commit ourselves to. Aware that he had been drinking, he had wanted to stay in Tangier for the night, but Jo was in a state of panic, and wanted to get to Richard’s “right away”. One might say, David is too drunk for the party-games of “attitudes that have been put in the place of norms,” in the words of Robert Brandom. On the other hand, one might say that the party-guests, for all the deep drinking and cocaine-snorting and flirtation remain fundamentally self-absorbed and self-protective, as cold-blooded as fish.

As a visual spectacle, and for its cult of pleasure, the party-scenes in the film are stunning. It is hard to imagine David at this party. No one at the party sympathizes with David. Dally, whose character is given the stupidest lines captures this truth in a gnomic utterance: “David has been sent off into the desert to die.” Ralph Fiennes plays David Henninger with tremendous insight and control.

David gets into Abdellah’s jeep. Now the two adversaries, both fatherless, travel across the desert to bury Driss. It is a journey of combatants. David is still, he observes, and slowly, response by response, he puts together what he feels and what his commitment is, what Robert Brandom calls the “reciprocal relation of the Universals and the particulars.”

For instance, when David learns that Driss was Abdellah’s only child, he is taken aback. He weeps but it comes out like an awkward laugh. He apologizes to explain: “The world is a dreadful place, my father used to say, the best you can do is make fun of it.” He echoes, unknowingly, the last words that Driss tells his friend: “The world is cruel. My father says so, cruel is the word.”

After the burial of Driss, Abdellah eats with David, and tells him about the fate of the Berbers in modern Morocco; how, everything has been taken away from them; how in the context of the growing market in the million-year-old marine-reptile fossils found in the Sahara, their world has just become divided between the dead and the living, with the living being those who have so far managed not to die. The fate of Berbers is to survive by digging for fossils from “dawn to dusk” and selling plesiosaur “fossils,” marine-reptile fossils from millions of years ago by the roadside for few hundred dollars or euros.

Revealing the shamanistic faith of the Berber people, Abdellah tells David about the destructive power of the “jinn,” and that, possibly, Driss’s death may have something to do with jinn-like property of the fossil that he stole. As the novelist Tahar Ben Jalloun explains in his novel, A Palace in the Old Village, “Jinns, like angels, have no substance, and can live in desert waste or on the top of a pin.

They like water and tend to live by creeks and in wells and washrooms, cemeteries, and old ruins. Fossil mining is the only life left for young boys like Driss. As Anouar puts it, “The renovation of one bathroom in Norway allows an entire a Saharan village to subsist for one year . . . We are the last ones. We have fossils and our children. And nothing else.” David recognizes this vanishing of a people, of children, the “vanishing” that the Moroccan filmmaker speaks of at the party.

The melting of David’s heart, his recognition of Abedellah’s grief is a slow process, a slow progression, not a gesture or a decision. It unfolds in the rough and tumble of his journey with the father of the boy he has killed. But even before all this, David was a man of beliefs rather than a man of attitudes. A man with faith in normative rules. David believed in the beginning that it was “an accident,” but he went with Abdellah to the village because it is a necessity, not to make a recompense or repair anything. In the opening scene, when David and Jo are lost, and looking at the map for the turn-off to Azna, they see a car go past, and David rightly assumes it is one of the party-guests, and they follow the car, but he is shocked that the party-guests do not bother to stop or slow down: “Strange they did not stop. We might have had a crash.” This is a norm, not a personal decision.

Rules like this determine what we make ourselves responsible for. The Arab and Berber “natives” in the film are not linguistically naïve, they speak multiple languages, Arabic, French, English, with rich complexity. The Moroccan proverbs that Hamid whips out come to the point so deftly that his friend suggests that he open a Twitter account: “The tongue has no bones, Sir, but it crushes all the same.” “A woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig’s snout.” If anything, it’s the language of the affluent party-guests that is the “zone of stupidity” even though their language is knowing, clever, amusing, ironic. The party-scene shows what having no interest other than interest in enjoyment,
amusement, pleasure is like. Avital Ronnell describes stupidity as something that is aligned with “malice, cruelty, and banality.”

The film does not align belief and non-belief in “a sentimental” or simplistic way as the reviews seem to suggest. David is a believer, and in terms of judgements and actions, he is aligned more with Hamid and Abdellah than with his enlightened, modern, cosmopolitan peers. David is tangled up in the horrible death of Driss but he is not leaping to avoid it, and he knows he must pay a price.

In a particularly tremendous sequence that dramatizes “natural law,” Abdellah Taheri, his face cold, his eyes gleaming moves towards David like a leopard, brandishing a knife, and at the final moment, holds himself back. David trembles with fear. Abdellah arranges for Anouar to drop him back at the villa in Azna. On the way back to the villa, Anouar and David stop in Alfin, and share a croissant and laugh, and the worst of it seems to be behind him.

But David continues to be preoccupied with the question of forgiveness: “Has Abdellah forgiven me,” he asks Anaour. Anaour can only offer a promise: “He judged you to be sincere. He could see how sorry you were. He must have forgiven you. I am sure of it. If he had not forgiven you, we would not be having tea here in Alfin. David, in return, makes a petition of forgiveness with a complete confession: “It was my fault. The accident. 100% my fault. I had been drinking all day. I was going too fast. I was arguing with my wife. Driss did nothing wrong except to step into the road to make us slow down. It was my fault. It was my fault.”

David accepts his responsibility, that it was by his hand that Driss died. But the death, his role in it is irreversible, and the next sequence shows Abdellah dropping his tears into the ground where Driss is buried. The only answer to irreversibility is the power to forgive. But forgiveness is a process, all-too human and unpredictable. The only possible answer to unpredictability is a promise, like Anouar’s guarantee of Abdellah’s promise to forgive.

Spoiler-Alert! Spoiler-Alert! Spoiler-Alert! Spoiler-Alert!

David comes back from the journey a new man. Anouar calls him, “an honorable man” before he says good-bye. Hamid is waiting for David outside the gate with a glass of cold beer that David gulps down with satisfaction. When asked if Richard sent him, Hamid says “No, I saw the car coming.” David understands that he now has “a welcome party of one” in Hamid, a friend, he will soon have to say “good-bye” to.

The puzzle that is loaded into the film has to do with forgiveness, what it means and what it entails. Who has the power to forgive? Is forgiveness the end of punishment? Is forgiveness a complete gesture? Or, is forgiveness, at best, a hesitant gesture? A small progression? Does forgiveness restore balance?

In the final scene, the Henningers are driving back to Tangiers. They are listening to Velvet Underground, Jo wants to talk, but David does not: “There is no need to talk, one always has the choice to not talk.” David wants to stop at the crossroad where he hit Driss with the car. “How can one hate Lou Reed, David asks Jo, when they spot someone at the crossroads. Jo thinks it’s a carjacking and begs David not to get out of the car. But David understands. And he knows what he must do. He looks at Jo, turns off the ignition, gets out of the car and greets the young boy: “Salaam Alekum.” The boy responds, “Peace be upon you.” “Did Abdellah send you?” As the boy drops the fossil he is holding in his left hand, David tells him: “Do it. Do it.” And the boy does. Finishes him off. The camera focuses on David’s falling body, then on his body on the sand, then on his shoes, an object of scorn at the party. Jo’s face is splattered with David’s blood. The follow-shot moves away from David’s body to follow Driss’s friend who turns around and walks away. It is not clear whether the boy is doing Abdellah’s bidding or whether this revenge is his own initiative. Or, whether it is even revenge or a punishment? Perhaps, forgiveness, as we see it in the final scene, is a norm-based refusal of the cycle of revenge. David meets his fate, his punishment, with intentionality, with sovereignty.

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Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.

Padmaja Challakere in The Beacon