A War (Krigen)

A WAR (Krigen)          B                  

Denmark  (115 mi)  2015  d:  Tobias Lindholm         Official Facebook

Denmark sent 9,500 military personnel to Afghanistan between January 2002 and July 1, 2013, according to Danish reports, which totals more than 60% of their entire military force, where 42 soldiers were eventually killed, more per capita than any other European country.  Making matters worse, Denmark aired a blockbuster TV drama series that was screened throughout Europe that was entitled The Killing (Forbrydelsen) (2007, 2009, 2012) where in the second season the story veered into a mass cover-up of civilian killings in Afghanistan involving Danish soldiers, which was further accentuated by the release of Janus Metz Pedersen’s incendiary documentary film ARMADILLO (2010) that won the Critic’s Week 1st Place Grand Prize award at Cannes in 2010.  Armadillo was the name of the operating base in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan where the filmmaker spent six months with Danish soldiers who were situated less than a kilometer away from Taliban positions, where at one point they are caught in a hellish firefight with insurgents that was partly filmed by a camera strapped to one soldier’s helmet, where the dire situation they found themselves in only resolved itself following the success of a hand grenade.  What shocked the Danish public were the comments of a young soldier who claimed they were exhilarated afterwards, high on adrenaline, and just sprayed the vicinity with machine-gun fire, killing everyone, wounded or dead, then posed for pictures (reminiscent of Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse) that portrayed themselves as boastful heroes next to piles of dead bodies, which led to a political inquiry and opened up questions back home about the morality of their mission.  While there have been American films depicting the nightmarish psychological effect on soldiers sent to war regions, like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo (2010), and prior to that, DEER HUNTER (1978), showing the destabilizing effects of the Vietnam War, this is one of the few films depicting what is essentially a Danish view of the war, something not really seen since the devastating ethical dilemma of Susan Bier’s BROTHERS (2004).  As the co-writer of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (Jagten) (2012) and the writer/director of A Hijacking (Kapringen) (2012), Lindholm has established himself as a guardian of emotional authenticity, never overdramatizing situations that are intensely real and bracingly uncomfortable.  

A welcome relief from the overly simplistic, hero worship trends that have defined American war movies of late, which are little more than patriot adulation, where Michael Bay’s latest, 13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016), has been referred to in political debates and played in rented stadiums by Republican candidates running for President (namely Donald Trump in Iowa), generating some chilling comments by Christopher Hooks from Gawker, January 15, 2016, who witnessed the world premiere at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys football team, often referred to as “America’s team,” I Watched Michael Bay's Benghazi Movie at Cowboys Stadium With 30,000 Pissed-Off Patriots:  

Bay has an almost pornographic feel for the physics of modern war: The cartoon arcs of RPGs in flight; the swiveling, passionless eye of a Predator Drone; expensive, bullet-riddled cars careening through city streets; planes and helicopters and technicals and men with guns, all in hues bordering on the psychedelic. But the human element is less firmly in his grasp, and the moral landscape of the movie is poisonous.

In the first decade after 9/11, Hollywood didn’t really know how to handle America’s new wars. To the extent films addressed them at all, they tended to focus on how they damaged ordinary people. Movies like Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, and The Hurt Locker were not uplifting—at their worst, they could be moralizing and turgid. And they were not successful. The broader culture honored the rank-and-file men and women who sacrificed to fight America’s wars: Support the troops.

In the last few years, as the wars changed shape and expanded, a strange thing happened. The culture began to focus not on ordinary soldiers, but on extraordinary ones—Navy SEALs, special forces operators, military contractors. The movies changed—Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, American Sniper. They celebrate heroes, they take place in a vacuum of political context, and they’re hugely profitable. Strangely, they cater to people who think Hollywood hates them. Film studios, suddenly, learned to love the wars.

13 Hours fits neatly in this new genre. It’s a story told from the perspective of men of extraordinary martial prowess in a deeply unfamiliar and hostile place, surrounded by faceless and unknowable enemies, desperate to survive. It’s a siege movie, and the major plot points would make just as much sense if they were transposed to a movie about a zombie attack, or an alien invasion.

Perhaps in response to bombastic Hollywood overkill, this Danish film, among the five finalists in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars, is instead a more measured and intelligent approach, scrutinizing the effects of the Afghan war on multiple fronts, not just the frontline soldiers, but their families back home, while also evaluating the overall impact this has on a rapidly developing, modern European perspective.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the first wars Denmark has fought since the Second World War, immersing a new generation of youth into combat situations, where families become invested in the wounded or the dead, where in a small nation of 5.5 million, it’s hard not to know someone who was affected.  Using real soldiers instead of extras, Lindholm’s insistence upon unflinching realism places the viewers on the front lines in another film about normal people stuck in abnormal situations.  We see the war largely from the Company commander’s viewpoint, Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek), who’s attempting to establish trust with the locals of Helmand province in a peace-keeping mission, but it’s a difficult proposition, as the villagers are caught in between opposing forces, where they are visited by the Danish NATO peace-keeping forces by day, while the Taliban make threats against them by night.  Even those with good intentions may feel paralyzed, rather than emboldened, by this seemingly futile power struggle.  Early on Claus loses one of his men when a young soldier strays slightly off path and gets blown up by an IED, or hidden roadside bomb that is buried just below the surface.  This has a way of unnerving Claus’s men, in particular one soldier named Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri) who was particularly close to the deceased.  As a way of calming his men down, he steps outside of the commander’s tent and accompanies the men on daily patrols, where his daily presence has a way of reassuring them.  This is ironic, as back home we see his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) struggle with raising three children alone, especially the oldest son who has been getting into fights at school, clearly missing his father and in need of the same reassuring guidance that Pedersen provides his men.  Despite the distance between them, Claus tries to call home at regular intervals, maintaining personal contact, where there are parallels between the difficulties encountered with communicating with his family and the challenges of maintaining good relations with a local community that is highly suspicious of their presence.  In each case, the family and the villagers get shortchanged, while the soldiers themselves end up being stuck someplace in the middle of nowhere.    

Spending the majority of the time with Pedersen and his unit, they have the feel of familiarity when all hell breaks loose, as the unit comes under attack during a routine patrol, initiated by the deaths of an entire family that was last seen talking to the patrol, setting a trap for their ambush.  With bullets and grenades coming from all sides, Lasse is seriously shot, where they are able to pull him back into the safety of their position while remaining pinned down behind a wall unable to see the source of incoming fire.  Pedersen’s courage under fire is severely tested, as headquarters refuses to send a medical helicopter until they can identify the location of the enemy, while a young man’s life hinges in the balance.  The intensity of the moment is ratcheted up by increasingly claustrophobic, handheld cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, where the viewer is pulled directly into the heart of a frenzied battle zone.  With screaming profanity as the only recognizable language in their chaotic predicament, life and death choices have to be made under the worst conditions imaginable.  With no musical cues or heart-thumping beats of percussion, Pedersen orders air support to take out a building compound where they believe the enemy is hidden.  In the aftermath, Lasse receives the necessary medical care and his men get out alive.  But shortly afterwards, his unit receives an unexpected visit from military officers investigating Pedersen’s conduct, where he’s immediately shipped home and charged with killing eight civilians without proper military authorization.  What has been a harrowing story out in the field changes course completely, where instead we get a glimpse of the Danish military court system which is systematically expressed in meticulous detail, instigating a somber reflection and accountability for what seemed like a few crazed moments of nerve-wracking combat.  In stark contrast to American films, which readily resort to exaggerated stereotypical depictions of heroism, accentuating extended battle scenes, this film only spends a few instantaneous moments in furious combat, then spends the rest of the film sorting out the consequences.  Using a cool and detached style reminiscent of Jan Verheyen’s Belgian courtroom drama The Verdict (Het Vonnis) (2013), the court offers what amounts to a truth and reconciliation committee on Europe’s involvement in foreign wars, where what appears to be good intentions eventually becomes a humbling experience that spells disaster.  While Pedersen’s men are present in the courtroom, much like the way police fill courtrooms involving one of their own, it becomes an open-ended yet somewhat absurd question for judges and prosecutors in Copenhagen to grasp the harrowing conditions under which soldiers in Afghanistan operate, where one man can’t be held accountable for the madness of war, yet the film was largely instigated by just such an incident in 2012, Danish officer faces trial over alleged killing of civilian, a case that probably never went to trial.  Instead this is more likely a supposition, asking if preserving the lives of your own men in combat is worth the calculated risk of killing civilians.  Certainly your own men are appreciative and can point to your actions for saving their lives, but those that were killed have families as well, where their perspective often goes unheard.  In this film, at least we consider the far-reaching and long-term consequences, which is certainly a more conscientious and healthy way to approach the subject.

Control Room

CONTROL ROOM            B                                                   
USA  (84 mi)  2004  d:  Jehane Noujaim

A documentary film piecing together bits of film accumulated by the Al Jazeera television network, whose reporters work alongside all the other American and European news teams from around the world centered at the U.S. Military Central Command headquarters in Qatar during the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but are unique, as they are the only Arab station.  The film director is an Egyptian-American woman who graduated from Harvard, and most importantly, she puts a human face on the enemy, previously castigated by both Bushes while rallying support for their war efforts, revealing Al Jazeera staff who work hard, question their own actions, who want the best for their families, and who ultimately have dreams, just like everybody else.  What this film shows is the extraordinary layers of lies built into the American and European fabric, having only their own biased television reporting to base their information, with no similar Arabic experiences or cultural references, and few, if any, who have ever heard the news from the Arab point of view.  So while Americans are seeing a sanitized war with few victims, almost never any blood, with missiles that are meant to have precisely accurate targets, minimizing the collateral damage, the Arabs are seeing the destroyed buildings and the bloodied men, women, and children, with plenty of dead bodies and angry families shouting out for revenge. 

All throughout the invasion, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is claiming Saddam Hussein is staging these so-called victims, using Al Jazeera reporters to film phony victims of the Iraqi propaganda machine, calling Al Jazeera “the mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden,” but it turns out it is Rumsfeld that is leading the propaganda campaign of lies and racist distortions, implying an Arab network offering a different view than the conquering Americans couldn’t possibly know how to be truthful or objective.  Also, it is startling to hear President Bush, at the time, demand that American prisoners be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, as he claims all Iraqi prisoners were, which, after the Abu Ghraib prison revelations, is a pitiful exhibition.  While this is a timely, well edited, but not particularly remarkable film, mostly it’s significant because it provides American viewers with a more balanced view of our own place in history.  What is interesting is how hostile Americans get if someone offers a contrary position and how foolishly gullible the American and European people and press are to the hand-chosen morsels of news that the U.S. military dishes out day by day, spinning their own account of the events, which is reported as gospel, when and how the Americans want it.  But Al Jazeera doesn’t buy it, even before a single shot is fired.  Their relatively inexperienced, unpolished journalists are the only professionals on the scene practicing any degree of journalistic objectivity, as they know from the beginning that no Arab nation would willingly submit to an American military occupation. 

So while Rumsfeld and Bush are indicating this is a liberating force, offering prospects of freedom, the Al Jazeera journalists can see the brutal mistreatment of Arab people for what it is, comparing the American behavior towards Arabs in Iraq to the Israeli treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.  In both instances people’s homes are bombed, bodies are pulled out bloody or dead, while survivors are rounded up and treated as terrorists, bullied, beaten, and intimidated at the point of a gun, the consequences of which are people only get more and more outraged.  Rumsfeld continuously blames the Al Jazeera network, repeatedly claiming they are telling lies after lies, which is ironic, as the Americans eventually send a missile into the Al Jazeera station in Baghdad killing one of the journalists.  The official American response was to claim shots were being fired from the buildings, causing the planes to attack, as they were being fired upon.  Little, if anything, from the American perspective has turned out to be true, though here Al Jazeera was offering their own spin of events, as it turns out that the Al Jazeera bureau was located next door to a villa used by Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister who towards the end of the war became known as ‘Comical Ali.’  Located between the buildings was an electrical generator which the U.S. military forces wanted immobilized in order to crank up the pressure on Al-Sahaf and the regime. Al Jazeera conceded later it was probably this equipment which the U.S. had targeted and not the Al Jazeera bureau.  What is perhaps the most startling aspect of this film is that it re-examines history through the fresh lens of hindsight.  Tellingly, one Al Jazeera reporter offers his own personal views, “Eventually, you will have to find a solution that doesn’t include bombing people into submission...Accept democracy or we shoot you.”

The Time That Remains

THE TIME THAT REMAINS                         B+                  

aka:  Chronicle of a Present Absentee

Palestine  France  Belgium  Italy  Great Britain  (109 mi)  2009  d:  Elia Suleiman

Except for the Middle East landscape, you’d swear Aki Kaurismäki was smuggled out of Finland to make this film, using that droll deadpan humor, the dark, acid wit, frequent sight gags, cleverly repeating motifs, and characters who rarely if ever speak, but Suleiman only uses Kaurismäki's trademark fades to black when there are significant time shifts all coinciding with a historical event instead of after every shot.  Not as dark or bitingly sarcastic as his last film which uniquely dealt with the comic absurdities of border disputes, as this remains comic but also ads an element of poignancy, taking a much more far reaching and personal scope, reaching into the narrative of his own family history, using his parent’s diaries and letters to comment upon the outrageous conditions resulting from the historical Arab-Israeli conflicts since the Israeli’s started occupying what was his Palestinian homeland in 1948, offering highly personalized portraits of life in Nazareth, now part of Israel, and the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the West Bank.   Maintaining its subversive tone throughout, there’s a stronger sense of urgency in the earlier footage of Elia’s father Fuad, Saleh Bakri, the handsome young Egyptian officer from THE BAND’S VISIT (2007), initially seen following the eyes of a beautiful neighborhood girl as she’s driven away in a car, one of many families that escaped the occupation altogether. 

Fuad is also seen sitting outside a street café with other resistance men carrying machine guns on their laps calmly sipping their coffee in a scene that could just as easily be the Sicilian mafia.  When a heavily armed freedom fighter runs past, the soldier is confused how to help, starting off in one direction and then the next, learning the armed conflicts were resolved almost immediately, so eventually discovering he’s an Iraqi they offer him food and companionship.  As the Israeli army approaches Nazareth, many Palestinians stripped out of their uniforms, dropped their weapons and fled.  The Israeli’s coolly wore the left behind Palestinian uniforms into town waving their flags where many who greeted them warmly were shot dead on the spot, which was followed by the official terms of surrender being offered to the Mayor to sign, where he can remain in power, but all guns are surrendered and the Israeli’s determine any sense of national emergency.  After his arrest, where an unrecognizable man in a hood identifies him to the Israeli military commander as the local metalworker who makes guns, we see him placed with others blindfolded, hands tied behind their back awaiting interrogations, images that strongly resemble Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, yet as he gets brutally beaten, there’s an eerie peacefulness to the pastoral beauty, especially the view of the ancient, terraced city that lies peacefully nestled in the valley below.       

In 1970, the Palestinians were chased out of Jordan, coinciding with the death of Egyptian President Nasser, which is being viewed on the television by Fuad, now having married the woman (Samar Tanus) seen leaving town earlier, and together they have a son (Elia) who sits quietly nearby, never uttering a word throughout the entire film, but we get the point of what he was subjected to.  In one of the more comical motifs, the little kid is called out of class for a private dressing down by the principal (the movie poster) who can’t figure out where he learned that America was a colonialist and an imperialist power, views directly in conflict with their teachings, where each time Elia is sent home from school carrying a plate of lentils from his Aunt Olga, which he is seen throwing in the garbage upon entering his home.  Aunt Olga makes periodic pronouncements to the family about what relative she’s seen on TV, eventually becoming nearly blind.  An all Palestinian children’s choir receives accolades and awards from the Israeli’s for successfully crossing the cultural barrier and singing patriotic Hebrew songs, all captured in photo shoots using a background of a dozen Israeli flags.  In one of the strangest sequences, the kids are amusingly subjected to an Arabic subtitled movie screening of Kirk Douglas in SPARTACUS (1960), the story of a rebellious Roman slave leading a violent revolt, as if that will raise their captive spirits.  The family also has an elderly neighbor who continually douses himself with kerosene, followed by a spew of choice expletives describing life under the Israeli’s, where Fuad, after putting out his own cigarette, is calmly seen removing the all but worthless matches from his hand and leading him back to his home.  

Ten years later, Elia, something of a free thinker like his father, flees the country, moving in 1980 to Ramallah, where he can be seen sitting in a café outside smoking and sipping coffee with several other elderly gentlemen.  Just out his window images can be seen of Palestinian kids throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers, where both sides stop their fighting to allow a mother with a baby stroller to safely cross the street before starting up again.  When the Israeli’s berate her to “Go home,” she offers a quick retort, “Why don’t you go home?”  Amazingly at one point an Israeli tank rumbles down the street, stopping at the house across the street where a young man crosses the street to take out the garbage, then crossing back, with the tank’s gun pointing at his head with every step, following his every move until he stops at his door and takes a cell phone call, casually talking to friends about a dance later on that evening, completely oblivious to the threat.  As Elia ages, the Arab resistance feels less of a sense of dire urgency, as if they’re all out of options except to simply ignore the Israeli presence as much as possible.  In something of a daydream sequence, Elia successfully pole vaults over the everpresent wall dividing the two worlds, but he can’t make it disappear.  Choosing a tone of strength from the bonds of family closeness and personal resiliency, Suleiman buries the bitterness of the past.  There is an eerily quiet sequence when Elia returns home to his aging widowed mother, as neither utters a word, yet these are the most poignant scenes in the film, which also do seem to accurately reflect the voice of the Palestinians.  They are a people without a country who have no voice.  At one point fireworks explode in the skies, but neither pays any attention, as there is nothing to celebrate, no more hollow victories, only each other.