One of my jobs is to help our International Education Week committee decide on a film for our "culture in motion" film series. It is one of the BEST parts of my job!
However, what I find difficult---is being as harsh as let's say Kenneth Turan, the L.A. Times movie reviewer. He is a seasoned reviewer and seems to find a movie's flaws effortlessly! Being the optimist I am...I usually see a metaphor or bright light as well as possible flaws like sterotyping etc.
So here is a film I watched last night. Maybe you out there in Blogville will watch it and send me your thoughts.
The Situation (2006)
I liked the film, even with its flaws (specifically with the character Anna [the reporter]). I think its attempt at providing insight into the next-to-impossible situation in Iraq is heroic, but leaves the viewer feeling unsatisfied. Maybe that's the point?
I think an insightful reviewer, Andy Slabaugh, put it very well, "Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves whether it is the obligation of art and artists to depict the awful ugliness spread at home and abroad by our fumbling leaders, or if it might be preferable to revel in works of beauty such that we might rise above our pitiful moment?"
What do you think?
The Situation aspires to be a film that approaches the US occupation of Iraq from a perspective that claims to pay some attention to the complexities of ‘the situation’ there; but, I’m afraid to say, it fails miserably. This is not aided at all by the many technical pitfalls that make the piece overall poor quality from a cinematic as well as conceptual point of view.
ReplyDeleteSo all the characteristics of a signature Hollywood saga about how the US has yet screwed up another nation in a far away and exotic place are observably present throughout the film, despite Philip Haas’s attempt to now and then throw a gesture that could suggest otherwise. Shot in Morocco, the film shows a bunch of Arab-looking men and women conversing in what may sound authentic Iraqi Arabic to a foreign ear. But alas, unless authenticity is an awfully awkward standard Arabic that is fraught with mistakes and literariness that suggests a counter translation from the original script in English. And the filmmaker puts no mentionable effort into concealing the Moroccan scenery, as there should be no big deal substituting Baghdad with Casablanca, for all are Middle Eastern non-places where either war or dust dooms everything to oblivion. One should wonder then, technical considerations aside, how this may resonate with the negligence of lived and recorded history and the victory of the American way of pretty much everything, from death to destruction to regime change to empowering women, till the end of the by-now boring mantra.
So here comes the American way of critiquing the occupation of Iraq in a sub-Hollywood fashion. Sub because, apparently, budgetary constrains meant a poorer quality overall, something which shouldn’t necessarily be the norm if one looks at successful low-budget films. For money spent could determine appeal most probably when Hollywood is the point of reference. A stumbled piece is thus further undermined by how the plot and characters are set. A brave blonde journalist walks into the perils of war by her inextinguishable professional thirst for truth. And, you guessed it, she’s American, who on occasion leaves the riches and comfort of the Green Zone, where her boyfriend works as part of the occupation administration, to venture into the jungles of Iraqi collapse and death. She is the medium between those conscientious Iraqis who, for some reason or another, can’t speak for themselves, and the world. That she is capable of speaking and obliging listening holds the film in balance, and makes it possible for the omissions in and from Iraq to register through the actress’s emotions and reactions. So instead of a White man’s burden and his civilizing mission, we may have a White woman’s burden and her salvaging mission, so to speak. So if White men screw up things the way the situation has ended up being in Iraq, White women have the advantage of humanizing that very thing that their male counterparts have almost ruined. In other words, humanizing not through the suffering of Iraqis, but through the internal turmoil of the blonde journalist. Around this crucial point one could see how the rest of the characters in the film, especially the Iraqi ones, are portrayed as just “half characters,” walking and talking silhouettes that lack the same rounded development and continuity as the lead actress’s. So Rafeeq, whose story the blonde wants the world to hear, and who speaks Arabic with a very heavy accent, is killed not because of political conviction, but because some thuggish member of an Iraqi security force is angry over not being able to date his daughter. The photographer, who at the end of the film sacrifices his life to rescue the journalist, is framed from the onset as likely a collaborator, almost an elusive outsider, simply because he’s Christian. Beyond this American fetish with tokenist diversity, it is not that hard to pinpoint how such depiction finds resonance with the present imaging of Iraq as Sunnis, Shia’s and Kurds fighting each other and amongst themselves. The Sheikh, a.k.a. the militia leader who challenges the authority of the propped up Iraqi puppet government, resorts to an expectedly crudish behavior handing out money to his men, smoking cigars, drinking expensive scotch, and yes dancing debaucherily with some fat-ass women, i.e., the full-fledged Orientalist picture of the classical camel jockey minus the camel and the oilfields.
Then finally there’s the boyfriend, a rationalist who sits is the Green Zone debating how the occupation could be improved to attend to some of the discontentment of the Iraqis, and who presents milder and less hasty a view of the infamous and misnamed Iraqi Freedom and Democracy. A ‘good occupier’ who sometimes gets in heated discussions with his assistant, a ‘bad occupier’ of the New-American-Century following. Out of good faith and good old, cold professional realism, this modern day Green Zone-bound cowboy tries to win the hearts of the Iraqis (hospitals, schools, and maybe peanut butter and jelly), despite all the disappointment with and frustration at the inability of the Iraqis to rule themselves and to rid their country of sectarian chaos and death. So the US occupation becomes a detail of the shadowy backdrop, and the irrationality of Iraq as country and Iraqis as chaotic graphings takes center-stage, a twist in the manner of the infamous bourgeois-liberal obsession with objective two-sidedness, even when this means equating the victim and the victimizer. It’s once again a repetition of the same opposition between Western rationality and Oriental impulsiveness. Even when such rationality is challenged, as in the case of the conflicting views of the bad and good occupier, there’s the blonde journalist who could restore the voice of reason through her role as salvager. In this way, even if not equal in guilt and ethical responsibility, the victim catches up and even surpasses the victimizer on the single one crucial account of being eternally locked into an irrationality that the White mind seems to always fail to comprehend, whether when taking on the perpetrator or salvager hat. In this, The Situation succeeds in failing to present its treatment of the Iraq situation as any different from how it’s presented in monopoly media.