**½/****
directed by Jonathan Demme
by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme alternates between fiction and documentary filmmaking, a practice that has gone curiously unheralded for an Academy Award-winning director of both mainstream and cult repute. If The Agronomist is any indication of what to expect from Demme's Cousin Bobby or Storefront Hitchcock, to name two of his earlier documentaries thus far unseen by yours truly, I can see why his studio features garner all the attention: though a committed work (Demme began tracking the exploits of his subject, slain Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, as far back as the late-Eighties), The Agronomist is amateurish bordering on sloppy, overreliant on newsroom-font intertitles as a way of not only conveying research but also patching together a chronology for newcomers to the seismic shifts in Haiti's inscrutable political climate. Additionally, however good his intentions, Demme had an obligation to lay into Dominique a little for his repeated self-exiles to New York City whenever the Haitian people needed his outspoken, progressive voice the most: he seems to count Dominique's founding of Haiti's first film club (which provides ample opportunity for cheesy inserts of classic one-sheets) as a pre-emptive bid for redemption. Still, their kinship, if you will, is not without avail: Demme's window into Dominique through this shared love of movies humanizes the latter in a way a standard piece of reportage might not, and The Agronomist's ending is appropriately cinematic in its bittersweet uplift. I suspect the next step is a biopic, which, if produced in America, will surely omit Demme's shrewd criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. Programme: National Cinema Spotlight
