Read the room next time you step into a jewellers. You may sense a gnaw of anxiety. The cause is laid bare in Nothing Lasts Forever, Jason Kohn’s funny, caustic documentary of panic in the diamond industry. Having just about persuaded consumers to forget its grisly history in African war zones, the existential threat to the trade these days is “synthetics”: lab-grown stones impossible to tell from the real thing. Technology is killing even bling.
The business seen here is the same junction of geoscience, psychology and outsize characters that inspired 2019 cult hit Uncut Gems. Kohn heads for the stretch of Midtown Manhattan that backdropped that film, the fabled Diamond District. Here, the status quo is defended by cartoonish industry veteran Martin Rapaport. His basic pitch — and grasp of gender relations — feel unchanged since Marilyn Monroe sang of a girl’s best friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Still, some of his logic is sturdy enough. The diamond remains a hard-wired symbol of romantic commitment.
Even that much is starting to wobble, however. (As Monroe put it, we all lose our charms in the end.) Elsewhere in the film, physicists create artificial rocks that can pass undetected even by experts. And they do. While estimates on how many synthetics are being sold as real vary, the result, should consumer trust collapse, is obvious: carnage in Midtown, London’s Hatton Garden, Tokyo’s Okachimachi, and so on.
But in Botswana, we meet Stephen Lussier, at the time of filming an executive at diamond consortium De Beers. He is endlessly urbane, without ever quite dispelling the onscreen remark of jeweller Aja Raden that it is hard to discuss the company “without sounding judgmental”. And yet that reputation wasn’t earned by people who would see their business die without a counter-offensive. It duly comes.
Amid the murk, things get philosophical: the real and the artificial blur. But the core of this sly, playful film is economic. The message is that long before synthetics, fakery was the hallmark of the diamond trade, the whole shebang born as a cynical marketing exercise. And the endgame was a price tag, attached to that most intangible commodity: love.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from February 10 and on digital platforms from February 13
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