Never released theatrically in Ireland, and showing here for two special screenings thanks to the support of Art for Amnesty, Fever is an adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s play about how a well-to-do Westerner comes to terms with world poverty, exploitation and Karl Marx. Vanessa Redgrave plays a woman who awakens in a hotel room in an unnamed, wartorn country. As she struggles to remember what brought her there, she reviews her privileged life and her unwitting role in maintaining world injustice and the status quo.
Radical politics have rarely been debated so openly in an American film, which even has cameos by Michael Moore (in his first fictional role) and Angelina Jolie (playing a guntoting freedom fighter). But the film belongs to Redgrave, who gives an intense, tour-de-force performance as a soulsearching Londoner. Fever is directed by Carlo Nero (Redgrave’s son), whose startlingly imaginative approach combines animation sequences, lavish location shooting and direct-to-camera monologues.