Travel narrows the mind

The Third World is hot in Hollywood. But all too often Abroad is simply the continuation of America by other means. Adam Mars-Jones looks at two latest offerings

The action-adventure film with a consciousness-raising component is an uneasy genre, as examples like Missing and The Killing Fields show; but John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon is a remarkably well-judged attempt to educate an audience's consciousness without altogether abandoning the function of entertainment.

Laura Bowman (Patricia Arquette), a young American whose husband and son have recently been killed, goes on holiday with her sister to forget her grief. Then her passport is stolen, and she finds herself forced to stay on in Burma at a time of political crisis. She comes to a generic "East", but gradually becomes involved with a specific country in upheaval. She witnesses a pro-democracy rally at night, after curfew, where Aung San Suu Kyi (a real person, played here by Adelle Lutz) walks through a barrier of soldiers armed only with a demure smile. Next day Laura hires a guide (U Aung Ko) to take her illegally into the countryside and, when martial law is declared, each of them feels responsible for the other.

The travelogue element in Beyond Rangoon is kept properly subservient to the story (screenplay by Alex Lasker and Bill Rubeinstein): we never feel that a gorgeous sky of blue and pink can be consumed separately from the travels of the people under it. The assumptions of American exemption are rapidly stripped away, since not everyone speaks English (and there are no subtitles to help us), Laura has money but it soon runs out, and there are times and places where the mantra "I'm an American citizen" is simply not powerful.

If Laura is there in the film to persuade an audience to identify with the miseries of a little-known country, she isn't arbitrarily chosen. Her bereavement already gives her an affinity with Burma, described as a country "injured by fate". But her character also contains an element of criticism of what she finds beyond Rangoon. Her inability to absorb the deaths of her loved ones strongly contrasts with a Buddhist tradition of acceptance, shown to be spiritually fine but politically disastrous. "We Burmese," as one character puts it, "are too polite to resist." He even proves it, by being unable to stay down when it comes to say goodbye to her, popping up irrepressibly in great personal danger. Laura's sense of outrage, the sheer novelty to her of suffering, affects those around her even as it gives way to something more complex. In a country of monks and soldiers, her medical training offers her a third possibility: of being a doctor.

Boorman isn't always a supreme director of actors, and Spalding Gray, who only has about three lines in the first place, is allowed to make a complete hash of one of them ("My God! I had no idea!"). But Patricia Arquette is magnificent, and is matched by U Aung Ko (playing, confusingly, a character of the same name not based on himself) who had never acted before.

The director's imagery is unusually restrained. When Laura is surprised by a soldier while stealing medical supplies, we see her standing frozen next to a life-sized model of a torso with the innards displayed for teaching purposes - a model also of her fears. If only Boorman had resisted the temptation of having the soldier strike a match on those exposed ceramic guts!

The theme of children, over-explicit in the heroine's dreams, is otherwise well-integrated into the story. The Burmese children we see aren't sentimentalised. They have no exemption from violence, but they do intervene to help Laura. At one point, when she is nerving herself to cut out a bullet from someone's shoulder with a knife she has held in the fire, she looks at a sleeping child's feet and gets courage from them somehow. The camera shows us what she sees: dirty feet already marked by work and poverty, an image subtle and unforced in its meaning. Thanks to Arquette's performance and Boorman's tact, we too receive a passing intimation that, in the words of U Aung Ko, "suffering is the only promise that life always keeps". But this is not a despairing revelation, and Laura can make repairs with her knife, if she dares.

With Frank Marshall's Congo, it's business as usual for the action picture: a little politics (a very little), lots of scenery, snakes, volcanoes and special-effect hippos ambushing rubber rafts. If you've never actually seen a tribe of homicidal gorillas flambed by lava, here's your chance.

The script is based on a Michael Crichton novel, from a period (1980) when he was only half slick. There's plenty of hi-tech on display, but the basic armature of the story could come from Conan Doyle's The Lost World or Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. The only twist is that Solomon's diamonds are wanted for their use in lasers.

Pure science is represented by Peter (Dylan Walsh) who is returning to the jungle a gorilla, Amy, who has learned sign language - broadcast as a synthetic little-girl voice by the first of many gizmos - but wants to go home now, thank you very much. Applied science goes by the name of Karen Ross (Laura Linney), sent by her technocratic boss ("I'll be human later") to find out what happened to a previous diamond-hunting expedition.

Applied science learns from pure, that's the idea, as Karen becomes disgusted with her employer's indefinitely deferred humanity and warms to Peter. At the end she even throws away the crucial diamond. But the film is also saying something quite different. When Professor Challenger or Allan Quartermain dealt with nature and natives, their technology (maps and guns) wasn't identical with their superiority, merely one sign of it. In Congo, Karen never runs out of gadgets, all of which are mobile and lightweight.

Everyone in Africa speaks English. (On rare occasions, the uneducated speak the universal language of Subtitle.) Anything can be known in depth at short notice; even extinct civilisations have no secrets. "Those hieroglyphics we've seen everywhere," says Tim Curry's Romanian treasure-hunter, gutturals a-go-go. "I translated them!" He speaks with the modest pride of someone who has finished the Telegraph crossword before lunch. Peter sings Amy to sleep with "California Dreamin'", and the porters join in. Native bearers know the Mamas and the Papas Songbook; Africa is Disneyland.

n On release from Friday