"Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." - Edward Said
"The Deceivers" is a poor film by the usually reliable Nicholas Meyer. Whitewashing the actions of the British Empire within Asia, the film is set in 1820s India and stars Pierce Brosnan as Captain William Savage, a tax collector for the British East India Company. As the Thuggees, a Kali-worshipping cult, have been committing robberies and mass, ritualistic murders, Savage infiltrates the group and attempts to put an end to their crimes.
Nicholas Meyer's not an idiot. His film clearly attempts to attack the paternalistic, condescending and bloody attitudes of the British Empire, which, largely in collusion with private mercantile corporations, would result in the indirect or direct deaths of over a billion Indians across a roughly 2 century period.
And so "The Deceivers" initially portrays Savage as the poster-boy for "liberal enlightenment". He's a "good Imperialist", a "good tax collector", who has many Indian friends and speaks several local languages. Once he infiltrates the cult, however, Savage "becomes a savage". Savage not only puts on brown face-paint in an attempt to go undercover and so infiltrate the cult, but he "literally reveals himself to have always been a barbarian" who enjoys murder, death and sexual debauchery. Under the facade of the civilised white man, Meyer thus says, is third world primitivism. Is a monster adept at deceiving itself. These themes are made clearest during sequences in which Meyer cuts between Thuggee rituals and Savage's memories of Western church ceremonies, no less a form of primitive superstition.
Whilst such themes may work in David Lean's "A Passage to India", they don't work at all in "The Deceivers". The film's stance – beneath "civilised" Europe lurks the barbarism of the "native" - is sophomoric, dilutes the larger aims and horrors of Imperialism, and has the unintentional effect of demonizing the Indians. The film also unintentionally validates an old Victorian trope: the idea that the Empire, for all its problems, was nevertheless necessary for taming the native, the frontier and conflicting groups. The Empire, then, brought order.
Whilst it is true that the Empire did bring a type of order (it crushed many monarchs and gangs), it also practised divide and conquer, sowed disorder and fuelled rivalries. Similarly, the "peaceful order" it brought was pretty undesirable. Most of the regions ruled by the British at the time only got worse. West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, East Bengal etc were the poorest, most lawless states, ridden with ethnic conflicts and disease. Even today, these parts lag behind the rest of contemporary India. Those places once ruled by Indian monarchs during the 1700s and 1800s (Travancore-Cochin, Mysore, Hyderabad, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab-Haryana etc), in contrast, now exhibit stronger economic and social progress. In short, European colonialists were much more adept at exploitation and extraction than local feudalists.
The name Thuggee comes from the Sanskrit word for "deceiver". In the 1830s the group is said to have killed about 30,000 people. Historians like Martine van Woerkens ("Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India"), however, have contested much of the mythology ascribed to the Thuggees. Many see the group as being largely a product of "colonial imaginings": British fears of the little-known interior of India. Afterall, the British in India found themselves culturally isolated. Most had grown up in an England where public meetings were illegal and where the faintest hint of social gatherings or secret brotherhoods were sufficient to arouse draconian reactions. A combination of paranoia, authoritarian instincts and religious intolerance thus gave way to a kind of militant zeal for Thugg-bashing. Even historians who agree that the Thuggees were real and genuinely responsible for mass murders, like Mike Dash, reject the colonial emphasis on religiously motivated crimes, and instead asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for Thuggee murders; the gangs were in extreme poverty, and were a natural result of British rule in India (and the economic realities generated by the Empire's opium trade).
"The Deceivers" is poorly shot and never convincingly captures the tempo, look or feel of 19th century India. The attitudes, mannerisms and dialogue of virtually all of Meyer's cast also rings false. Elsewhere the film struggles to reconcile two goals: being a Victorian boy's adventure (which were typically racist and paternalistic), and being a politically correct condemnation of Empire. Meyer would attempt similar themes with "Star Trek 6: An Undiscovered Country".
5/10 - See "A Passage to India", "North West Frontier" and Satyajit Ray's "The Chessplayer".
"The Deceivers" is a poor film by the usually reliable Nicholas Meyer. Whitewashing the actions of the British Empire within Asia, the film is set in 1820s India and stars Pierce Brosnan as Captain William Savage, a tax collector for the British East India Company. As the Thuggees, a Kali-worshipping cult, have been committing robberies and mass, ritualistic murders, Savage infiltrates the group and attempts to put an end to their crimes.
Nicholas Meyer's not an idiot. His film clearly attempts to attack the paternalistic, condescending and bloody attitudes of the British Empire, which, largely in collusion with private mercantile corporations, would result in the indirect or direct deaths of over a billion Indians across a roughly 2 century period.
And so "The Deceivers" initially portrays Savage as the poster-boy for "liberal enlightenment". He's a "good Imperialist", a "good tax collector", who has many Indian friends and speaks several local languages. Once he infiltrates the cult, however, Savage "becomes a savage". Savage not only puts on brown face-paint in an attempt to go undercover and so infiltrate the cult, but he "literally reveals himself to have always been a barbarian" who enjoys murder, death and sexual debauchery. Under the facade of the civilised white man, Meyer thus says, is third world primitivism. Is a monster adept at deceiving itself. These themes are made clearest during sequences in which Meyer cuts between Thuggee rituals and Savage's memories of Western church ceremonies, no less a form of primitive superstition.
Whilst such themes may work in David Lean's "A Passage to India", they don't work at all in "The Deceivers". The film's stance – beneath "civilised" Europe lurks the barbarism of the "native" - is sophomoric, dilutes the larger aims and horrors of Imperialism, and has the unintentional effect of demonizing the Indians. The film also unintentionally validates an old Victorian trope: the idea that the Empire, for all its problems, was nevertheless necessary for taming the native, the frontier and conflicting groups. The Empire, then, brought order.
Whilst it is true that the Empire did bring a type of order (it crushed many monarchs and gangs), it also practised divide and conquer, sowed disorder and fuelled rivalries. Similarly, the "peaceful order" it brought was pretty undesirable. Most of the regions ruled by the British at the time only got worse. West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, East Bengal etc were the poorest, most lawless states, ridden with ethnic conflicts and disease. Even today, these parts lag behind the rest of contemporary India. Those places once ruled by Indian monarchs during the 1700s and 1800s (Travancore-Cochin, Mysore, Hyderabad, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab-Haryana etc), in contrast, now exhibit stronger economic and social progress. In short, European colonialists were much more adept at exploitation and extraction than local feudalists.
The name Thuggee comes from the Sanskrit word for "deceiver". In the 1830s the group is said to have killed about 30,000 people. Historians like Martine van Woerkens ("Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India"), however, have contested much of the mythology ascribed to the Thuggees. Many see the group as being largely a product of "colonial imaginings": British fears of the little-known interior of India. Afterall, the British in India found themselves culturally isolated. Most had grown up in an England where public meetings were illegal and where the faintest hint of social gatherings or secret brotherhoods were sufficient to arouse draconian reactions. A combination of paranoia, authoritarian instincts and religious intolerance thus gave way to a kind of militant zeal for Thugg-bashing. Even historians who agree that the Thuggees were real and genuinely responsible for mass murders, like Mike Dash, reject the colonial emphasis on religiously motivated crimes, and instead asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for Thuggee murders; the gangs were in extreme poverty, and were a natural result of British rule in India (and the economic realities generated by the Empire's opium trade).
"The Deceivers" is poorly shot and never convincingly captures the tempo, look or feel of 19th century India. The attitudes, mannerisms and dialogue of virtually all of Meyer's cast also rings false. Elsewhere the film struggles to reconcile two goals: being a Victorian boy's adventure (which were typically racist and paternalistic), and being a politically correct condemnation of Empire. Meyer would attempt similar themes with "Star Trek 6: An Undiscovered Country".
5/10 - See "A Passage to India", "North West Frontier" and Satyajit Ray's "The Chessplayer".