/>Fernando Meirelles
Rating: *** ½

Don't let the constant bustle of the Kenyan landscape fool you. At heart The Constant Gardener is an intense love story about the wages of slumming.

It's the story of the hot-headed activist Tessa (unforgettably radiant Rachel Weisz) and her devoted if somewhat bewildered husband Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) and their mess-adventures in Africa.

The film takes the couple's suddenly-acquired love story into marriage murder and nemesis, and yet remains true to John le Carre's novel.

High on atmospherics and low on high drama, director Fernando Meirelles weaves a stirring and often haunting drama out of the Tessa-Justin love story. The passion is delineated in astonishing details that give the film its special and unforgettable elegiac tone.

The director who earlier created the memorable City Of Gods, is on this occasion submerged in a world troubled by inter-personal strife. The conscience is the main protagonist in The Constant Gardener.

Constantly under surveillance it eventually emerges triumphant through a gentle persuasion exercised on the dense material by a director who knows how to keep the frames uncluttured without losing the substance in the drama.

Fiennes is very effective in portraying the feverish after-shock of lost love. He did so recently in The White Princess.

He does so again with immense sensitivity. His expressions of shy ardour in his early scenes of passion with his pregnant wife, and his later anguish after she's murdered rank among the most un-cynical portrayals of love and passion in recent times.

The narrative is structured as an exotic thriller. Finally what it yields for the audience is a finely threaded love story that tells us about remembrances of things lost.

A must-watch for those who look for undercurrents of emotion beyond the obvious.