Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic (2000) was a good film that pales alongside its brilliant source, the British television mini-series “Traffik” (1989). A “20th anniversary Edition” DVD (out Sept. 29) gathers all six episodes of a story that came more fully to life when spread over many more hours than was possible in a Hollywood feature film.
The story concerns international trafficking in heroin and follows a set of fully-developed characters as links on a chain beginning in the poppy fields of Pakistan and leading through the port of Karachi, where heroin is processed and shipped to the West, to the port of Hamburg, where it is parceled out to dealers, and a London townhouse, where a British cabinet minister in charge of drug policy confronts his daughter, an addict.
The scenes along the Pakistan-Afghan border seem all the more relevant in light of recent headlines from the unstable region. The farmers are only trying to keep their families from starving; the drug lords are intimately connected wit Pakistani authorities, who lead foreign dignitaries like the UK cabinet minister on carefully guided tours, promising that more aid money will convert profitable poppy farming into marginal sugar cane raising. The British official is no fool. He is concerned about conditions on the ground and a little skeptical of his hosts, but seems unable to make an emotional and imaginative leap into the realm of the problem and its solutions. He is the same with his daughter, distantly committed and trying to avoid public embarrassment.
Comic relief is provided by a pair of German cops, cynical but determined men who see themselves as heirs to The French Connection. The cinematography is superb, with some scenes outstripping most recent films for their use of cameras, lighting and the craft of cinema. The script never panders to low common denominators.
