Living in Paris comes with some perks, as you may have noticed by now, and movie premieres are definitely one of those. I went to the Paris Premiere of Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner, followed by a Q&A with him and one of the actresses, the french Olga Kurylenko. Set in Australia and in Turkey, we follow the journey of an Australian farmer looking for his three missing sons in the graveyard of the battle of Gallipoli, after World War I.
For a first movie, I’m impressed. We all know Russell Crowe the actor, but Russell Crowe the director is a nice discovery. He clearly made a commercial movie, but with a lot of heart and effort put into it. I didn’t really know this particular aspect of World War I well, mostly knowing the European French/German/British part of it, but it got me really interested in learning more about the Gallipoli campaign.
The Water Diviner is an epic movie of epic proportions. Shot in Australia and in Turkey, we are given beautiful sights of both countries. Fun fact, it is the first movie allowed to film inside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. It really made me want to go back to Istanbul and travel, go figure why. However, it is not only about aesthetic, but it’s about emotions, familial bond, and intuition.
As the title indicates, Connor, the main character portrayed by Russell Crowe, is a water diviner, meaning that he knows where to look when it comes to finding water. It’s all about intuition. The same way he has that intuition about finding water, he has it to find his sons. He feels what they felt in the battlefield and he can feel them no matter where or how far they are. It’s exactly like that feeling you can have sometimes, you can’t explain it but you know something’s gonna happen. That intuition can also be seen as hope. When there’s hope, there’s life.
The Water Diviner plays a lot on the audience’s emotions, it is made to make you cry. You have a father who lost his three sons in the war and can’t have any sense of closure, going into a country he doesn’t know to try to find them in a no man’s land. War, family and separation, the recipe to a great drama. But there’s no surprise here, you have the “intuition” that one of his sons is still alive from the very beginning. However, even if the romance between Connor and Ayshe, portrayed by Olga Kurylenko, was quite unnecessary, it was a nice little touch in a very serious movie.
I have to say that one of the last scenes of the movie, with the 3 brothers badly injured on the battlefield, was one of the strongest and meaningful scene I’ve seen in a while. I detected two points of view in this scene. First, there’s the point of view of one of the brothers, who thinks he couldn’t fulfill the promise he made to his father, and had to shoot one of his brothers to put him out of his misery. And there’s the point of view of history, and the fact that this situation must have happened during that war, or any war as a matter of fact. It’s truly terrifying to be reminded how those wars were destructive and how many people died, but it’s also important to remember and learn about what happened.
The Water Diviner is a beautiful and must-see movie. It really got me excited for another Russell Crowe movie, and I really hope this wasn’t just a one-time thing, but like he said, he really wants to make another, and for that, you really have to go and see it!
Rating: 4/5
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