Botanists seem to be having a bit of a moment on screen. Matt Damon plays a green-fingered astronaut in The Martian (2015) and now this handsome Danish historical drama washes ashore, in which Jakob Oftebro's horticultural expert Wulff Joseph Wulff is dispatched to Guinea in 1836, under orders from the king to establish a new coffee plantation on the colony.
Already compared to Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness (1899) and the work of Terence Malick and Werner Herzog, Gold Coast concerns itself with the idealistic Wulff's wonder at the equatorial flora he encounters and the vibrancy of the natives and his growing horror at the drunken debauchery of the few white settlers living in the area's stone forts. Slavery is supposed to have been outlawed, but Wulff quickly learns that something is rotten and is encouraged by a sympathetic missionary to expand his brief beyond instructing his charges about planting cycles and Galileo. Inspired, Wulff appeals to the sickly governor (Morten Holst) to allow him to lead a campaign to arrest people-trafficker Richter (Wakefield Ackuaku), only to find his mandate revoked when Dall (Anders Heinrichsen) assumes control of the outpost. Ostracised and imprisoned, Wulff struggles to hold onto his sanity.
Speaking at the Cineworld Haymarket as part of the LFF, director Daniel Dencik agreed with the above comparisons and cited Herman Melville's Typee (1846) among his other influences, in addition to the many contemporary diaries he read as part of his meticulous research process. Dencik also advised us that watching Gold Coast was not a matter of weighing up whether or not we "liked" the film in the social media sense. Rather, we were instructed to simply dive in and sample its sensory wares, "like eating an oyster or LSD". A sound approach.
A documentarian and writer, Dencik's debut fiction feature is as gorgeous a spectacle as you could wish to encounter, holding its own against the likes of Roland Joffe's The Mission (1986) or Malick's The New World (2005) and capturing the stormy beauty of its shooting locations in Ghana and Burkina Faso. It's never po-faced though: a marvelling, microscopic close up of sunlight streaming through a leaf is quickly undermined by a cut to a scab on Wullf's leg, oozing pus. Similarly, although Gold Coast's interiors and costumes are splendid, Dencik deftly manages to sidestep the clichés of period drama, never forgetting the piss and malaria of colonial living. The film's good looks are complimented by a bold and counter-intuitive electronic score from the great Angelo Badalamenti and an extremely committed performance from Oftebro. The actor appears in almost every scene and undergoes visible weight loss, almost on a par with Christian Bale's in The Machinist (2004), when Wulff is starved and imprisoned by his corrupt peers.
Criticism of Gold Coast has inevitably centred on its earnestness and "problematic" failure to offer a black perspective on the events it depicts. People, of course, love to throw the word "problematic" around like confetti at a wedding. On the contrary, I found Gold Coast to be enormously compassionate and humane and regard Dencik's decision to stick to the perspective of one outsider a wise and economical one. This is very much an account of an individual's experiences and benefits from the intimacy of its scale. The young director succeeds in throwing a light on an overlooked and little filmed aspect of European colonial history in some style. A really admirable undertaking.
