The War in Iraq cost Americans nearly 4500 casualties,
32,000 more wounded in action, and 175,000 Iraqi’s dead, not to mention 3.5 to
4 trillion dollars spent, a heavy price to pay for the disposal of Saddam
Hussein, where what we got out of it was a tenuous democracy, at best, and, at
least judging by this effort, we now get Hollywood style genre films out of
Iraq. We have seen films dealing with
the Kurdish border regions coming from Bahman Ghobadi, an Iranian Kurdish filmmaker,
in particular A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES (2000), set on the Iran-Iraq border,
and TURTLES CAN FLY (2004), the first film to be made in Iraq since the fall of
Saddam Hussein. Hiner Saleem, however,
is the first Iraqi filmmaker, also of Kurdish ethnicity, to successfully export
Iraqi films in international festivals, playing at the Un Certain Regard at
Cannes, while winning the Gold Hugo Best Picture prize at the Chicago
International Film festival, where the jury described it as “a refreshing film
that uses different genres in an original way to deal with important
issues.” Something of a spaghetti
western that opens with gallows humor, the film is set in 2003 right after the
fall of Saddam Hussein as the new Iraqi regime can’t even conduct their first
hanging properly without making a mockery of the ordeal, where, lacking official
resources, the criminal was forced to
stand on an upside down ballot box. Disgruntled by the bumbling lack of efficiency,
former war hero and Kurdish freedom fighter Baran (Korkmaz Arslan) leaves city
administration and returns home to his village.
But he soon tires of his mother continually arranging blind dates for
tea, each with a renewed attempt to marry him off, so he returns to work where they
send him to be the first policeman in the Kurdish hinterlands, a remote, no
man’s land region in northern Iraq along the Turkish border. It’s a 3-building town with only two phones consisting
of a ramshackle police station that is in a state of disrepair, a local elementary
school, and a town saloon called Pepper Land that also passes as a hotel.
In the event the audience couldn’t figure out the subversive
tone of Westernized humor interspersed throughout the film, what spells America
better than Elvis Presley? One of the
more curious moments is seeing Baran barreling down the highway in his
convertible with Elvis on the stereo blaring “(You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t
Care” Elvis Presley # Baby
I Don't Care (Jailhouse Rock) YouTube (2:02), finally free again of his
mother’s clutches. But due to a damaged
bridge on the road, he’s forced to go the rest of the way by horseback, which
immediately sets the tone for homages to Clint Eastwood in his Man with No
Name, Sergio Leone era. Along the way,
of course, he picks up the young heroine of the movie, Govend (Golshifteh
Farahani), a 26-year old unmarried beauty with an independent streak, a school
teacher defying tradition, forced to fend off her father and dozen brothers
just to get there, as they fear for her alone in some backwater outpost. Intrigue mounts when the school is locked, as
this also prevents her from reaching her room in the back. Forced to try the saloon, apparently no
honorable Muslim man would allow a single woman a room for the night (the mind
boggles), so Baran gives her a room at the police station, which spreads
venomous rumors about their ignoble character throughout the territory. Enter the man in black, the local warlord
Aziz Aga (Tarik Akreyi), only here he’s made to look a bit like Yasser Arafat,
wearing the traditional black and white headscarf (keffiyeh) around his head, draped
over one shoulder, while toting an automatic weapon. This is a director that is freely playing
with stereotypical images, interjecting Western movie lore for absurdly dark
humor, much like Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman in DIVINE INTERVENTION
(2002), continually poking fun at the ingrained perceptions of cultural ignorance,
which are largely a result of decades of isolation and political oppression. Yet what the film does hold close to its
heart are the rugged Kurdish landscapes, beautifully captured by the cinematography
of Pascal Auffray, who normally works with Mia Hansen-Løve.
While the Kurdish population is divided between the borders
of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, Aziz Aga transports stolen black market goods
through the mountainous borderland regions, indiscriminately selling arms,
alcohol, and medical supplies, literally cornering the market, forcing
customers to pay exorbitant prices while local villages go without
medicine. While this is a lesson in
capitalism, it’s also corruption of the highest order, where a band of female
Turkish resistance fighters also roam the mountains, occasionally engaging in
skirmishes with Aziz Aga for needed medicine.
The warlord hides under the banner of moral authority, calling the women
infidels and greedy whores for daring to interfere, and when he learns of
Baran’s attempt to legitimize the law under anyone’s rule other than his own,
he spreads rumors of their unholy alliance under one roof in an attempt to drive
them both out of the region. Govend
can’t teach if no one sends their children to school, and Baran’s law is
useless if no one obeys. Aziz Aga and
his ruthless band of cutthroats rule by fear and by hoarding goods, as they
have for hundreds of years, while Baran and Govend are committed to new and
unproven concepts in the region, such as childhood education and the
restoration of law and order in a war damaged country. Amidst this chaotic scene, a discreet romance
blooms between the two outsiders mysteriously brought together under differing
circumstances, but sharing common goals.
The broadly outlined themes may be overly obvious to western eyes, as is
the subversive spin on female empowerment, which is all but missing in Islamic
countries. While the film does feel broadly
over simplistic, it amusingly introduces liberating concepts that go against
the grain of Muslim traditions, where it will likely play better in the West
than in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, which are the areas worst affected by
illiteracy in Iraq, higher in the rural areas (25%) than urban areas (14%),
where illiteracy among women (24%) is more than double that of men (11%).
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