'Agronomist':
A Local Hero With a Global Message

By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page C05

"The Agronomist," a new film by Jonathan Demme, gets off to a start as unpromising as its title. Demme's portrait of the Haitian journalist and political activist Jean Dominique has all the earmarks of a conventional talking-head documentary, shot on unpretty video, with lots of typewritten titles across the screen to fill in the blanks on Haiti's wrenching history.

But soon, what seemed at first to be a conventional polemic turns into a thoroughly absorbing and deeply affecting portrait of an extraordinary leader. Dominique, a handsome, charismatic figure with a broad smile and a penchant for speaking in a mesmerizingly eloquent word jazz, is the centripetal force around which "The Agronomist" spins. A passionately devoted man, Dominique somehow gathers such disparate subjects as plant genetics, populism and French New Wave cinema to create a vibrant brand of politics. His story is inspiring and ultimately disheartening, as even his indomitable dedication to life and change is quashed in the course of Haiti's murderous contemporary history.

For people perplexed by recent events in that country, "The Agronomist" provides context, if not complete explanation. Dominique was 4 years old in 1934, when the U.S. Marines finally pulled out of the country they had been occupying for almost 20 years. As young Jean saluted U.S. uniforms, his father, referring to Haiti's long colonial history, admonished him that he wasn't French or British or American but Haitian. The moment instilled in him a fierce pride in his country and its mostly Afro-Caribbean people, and that pride lay at the heart of his decision to study plant genetics, with which he aimed to help the country's poor peasants improve their crops and, subsequently, their lives and fortunes.

Dominique went to study in Paris, and there he discovered the movies -- Fellini, Welles and, above all, the wave of spontaneous, subversive films that were sweeping France at the time. "The grammar of film is a political act," he explains, and when he returned to Haiti he founded the country's first cinema club, which indeed was a deeply political act in a country whose population was mostly illiterate. At that point Haiti was under the thumb of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier; after the cinema club screened "Night and Fog," Alain Resnais's searing document of Auschwitz, the club was permanently banned.

In 1968 Dominique purchased the lease to a radio station and began broadcasting investigative stories about the Duvalier regime and Haitian life, and in the Creole language that the peasantry could understand. For the next few decades, Dominique was a constant thorn in the side of Duvalier and then his son, Baby Doc, surviving arrests, attacks by their personal armies and two stints in exile in Manhattan.

Throughout these episodes, he maintained an unshakable dedication to the Haitian peasantry. He stayed on their side when the democratically elected priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide came to power and they continued to be disenfranchised, dispossessed and victimized by the new president's own personal militia. Dominique was even unafraid to question Aristide -- whom he had supported -- about corruption in his government. Eventually Dominique's many enemies caught up with him. He was gunned down outside the radio station in 2000, a month before the country's national elections.

"The Agronomist" would be an engaging film if it were just a portrait of Jean Dominique, who proves to be a witty, poetic and charming narrator of his own life. So, too, would it work simply as the record of an extraordinary love affair -- in this case between Dominique and his equally smart, attractive and brave wife, Michele Montas. But as it happens, "The Agronomist" also has important things to tell viewers about global politics, and in an eerily resonant way.

Like such recent arrivals as "The Battle of Algiers," "The Fog of War" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," "The Agronomist" is an urgent cautionary tale about the legacy of colonialism and the global deployment of U.S. power, one that has the added fillip of featuring a cameo appearance by Lakhdar Brahimi. In 1994 Brahimi was a United Nations representative in Haiti, and in one of the film's most startling scenes he is shown with U.S. officials being upbraided by Aristide over the international community's involvement in that country. Brahimi is now the U.N. envoy in Iraq. Observing him as he stonily listens to Aristide's accusations, it's impossible not to ponder what Haiti taught him and, to this day, what it is still painfully teaching us.

The Agronomist (90 minutes, in English and French with subtitles, at the Landmark E Street Cinema) is rated PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company