Yet The Noonday Demon stands as a testament to all those qualities that are lost during times of deathly meaninglessness: it describes numbness with vitality, wretchedness with poetry, lovelessness with passion, fear with exuberance, slack-jawed horror with wit and tenderness, deadly silence with this fervent outpouring of words.
Epic in scale and thorough in detail (the screenplay was based on extensive research by Ms. Bosch and the Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld), the film includes crowd scenes that heave with unforced wretchedness.
The exquisite filming is at odds with the wretchedness of what she depicts: Idi Amin's cells, the wrecked colonial villas, the ruins of Entebbe airport, and the fact that Bhimji is returning to the land of a lost childhood.
Finally, he stumbles into the desert, where Rapunzel lives in wretchedness with their twin children.
The news media have added to the general sense of wretchedness with numerous we-told-you-so accounts of mishaps, glitches and grandiose plans gone awry.
This is a place of epic wretchedness, with 80,000 Afghan refugees crammed into the busting seam of a dried-out riverbed.
Single, lonely, a depressed wanderer through the twilit seediness of Earl's Court, George survives on a private income that fatally allows him to numb his wretchedness with drink.
But nothing in that bungling could compare with the sheer wretchedness of the security police officers in the Biko case, who symbolized, in their brutal and callous treatment of a defenseless man, and in the jesting about it I heard in that courtroom passageway, just how far below human decency apartheid had descended.
For the past two decades, the country has become the poster-child for wretchedness – with a loss of civic solidarity, the destruction of the national state and institutions, an absence of able and legitimate leadership, and violent foreign interventions or mediocre international succour.
Wretchedness, depicted with great verve, plays as fun.
