There is a new cricket film about
the era of the great West Indies team of the Eighties and Nineties which
deserves to be seen.
Cricket documentaries are like
cricket books: there seem to be more of them than actual cricket fans, and few
of them are worth watching. Fire in
Babylon is not in that category. It has Bunny Wailer in it for a start, and
there is no real effort to place the entirety of cricket history into its 83
minutes. This is a film not for cricket fans, but for fans of documentaries, a
stylish cinematic good versus evil tale with lots of action sequences. It is as
if it was made so that guys could take their partners to it.
It is really an attempt at
cricket’s own When We Were Kings, a story about sport and politics with a
kicking soundtrack. Steven Riley does a good job of mixing the two up. Australian
cricket crowds racially taunted the West Indies; the English media turned them
into typecast thugs; and the Indians gave up a Test match against them so they
wouldn’t get hurt. Australia was just becoming a multicultural country, England
was struggling with race at home and here were these athletic giants crushing
every team in the world. It was bound to upset a few people. On top of that was
apartheid: several of the Windies players defected to play a rebel tour in
South Africa, causing much disgust for them back home. Riley lets the players
and a few key Caribbean celebrities tell the story. There are very few expert
talking heads and not once is Richie Benaud interviewed: an amazing feat in a
cricket documentary. They focus on the 1975 to 1984 period when Clive Lloyd
took a bunch of youngsters and turned them into the single most destructive
weapon in cricket history. To the players this was way more than cricket, it
was a statement about being black, about giving their region pride and proving
that they weren’t the calypso good time boys that they were often painted.
All of this is interspersed with
shot after shot of batsmen getting hit, mostly to a dub or reggae tune. Jaws
are broken, testicles are relocated, hands are shaking and bruises are shown.
This gives the documentary a lovely bite to it.
Where the film fails, and it
doesn’t very often, is in the treatment of the cricket. Riley is a skilled
director, but he is not a cricket geez, and that means some mistakes. Cricket
nerds will notice that the climax of the film, the 1984 series against the
English (a ‘blackwash’), involved a pretty poor English line up and that Riley
includes a shot of Alan Knott even though he
didn’t play.
Fire In Babylon is an emotional
film, one that sets the West Indies up as the heroes and the rest of the
establishment as racist, soft idiots. It
may not be the most accurate cricket documentary ever seen – but it is probably
the most fun and easily the most
stylishly directed.
Related Videos
