Water (Dick Clement, 1985)

Perhaps on its release in 1985, Dick Clement’s Water was able to draw some wan resonance from then-recent memories of Falklands-bound battleships and US support for Nicaraguan contras: if the colonial worldview it presents is outdated and teetering, it’s clear the film’s movers and shakers haven’t entirely realized that yet. The movie posits a Caribbean island of no strategic or economic interest, such that Britain has all but forgotten it’s part of the empire – Michael Caine plays the governor, long gone to seed (the movie’s soft touch is embodied in how the island appears colourful and easygoing, embodied by Jimmie Walker as the local radio host and by the prevalence of ganja, although the dialogue suggests we ought to be looking at utter squalor). Picking up rumours of possible insurgency and lacking the will to go through another Falklands-type conflict, Margaret Thatcher directs that the island’s population simply be moved elsewhere (to locations with hotels in need of cheap labour), but things ramp up when a group of Americans discovers that a long tapped-out oil well is now gushing a super-high-quality mineral water (which, in turn, attracts the interest of the French as well, detecting a threat to their own interests; there are also Cubans in the mix, but they eventually run off to Miami to become drug dealers). No doubt there’s some satirical point to how the debate about the island’s future never involves the islanders themselves – even the rebel leader is white (Billy Connolly, with an undisguised accent) – but the movie embodies the disregard as much as it parodies it. Compensations are few – certainly not the disengaged Caine or the barely-registering Valerie Perrine or the way-over-registering Brenda Vaccaro. Maybe the funniest joke is that the decision-making of the UN General Assembly should or would have been swayed by a George Harrison and Ringo Starr guest appearance…