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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The two segments of the film that have generated the most controversy are by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and British director Loach. To be honest, neither is a transcendent piece of filmmaking: Both bog down under the kind of heavy-handed polemicism that can make a work of art wither on the vine. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not against films having a political message -- I just think that the story should drive the politics, and not vice versa.)
Loach's film revolves around the fact that Gen. Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup in Chile also took place on a Sept. 11 -- in 1973. In the film, Pablo, a Chilean exile in London, writes a letter of sympathy to the families of 9/11 victims in New York, but the letter is a thin cover for a lesson about the atrocities perpetrated by Pinochet and the covert support he received from the U.S. "Your dollars brought violence to the streets," Pablo writes to the New Yorkers, and concludes: "We will remember you. We hope you will remember us."
Loach has always been an unapologetic leftist, and there's something bracing about his refusal to buckle under to received opinion. (I can't think of another director who'd have had the guts to interrupt the narrative of a war movie with a 20-minute political debate, as he did in "Land and Freedom.") But here, although his history lesson is thought-provoking, its tone is grating. It's simply too difficult to believe that a former torture victim would think it useful or sensitive to tell bereaved family members in New York about Chilean torture camps where "men trained in the USA ... put rats in women's vaginas."
At least Loach's film is lucid, unlike Chahine's rambling, postmodernist fable, in which a filmmaker called Youssef Chahine meets the ghost of a U.S. Marine killed in a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut. When Chahine takes the Marine to visit the family of the fundamentalist who assassinated him, the bomber's parents explain how "the Israelis fool everyone" and give a litany of America's foreign policy sins, from Hiroshima to Vietnam to Iraq. ("America says it defends its own values, but it destroys other civilizations," the filmmaker concludes.)
Given that "11'09"01" has positioned itself partly as a memorial to the events of Sept. 11, Chahine's use of his segment as a critique of American imperialism could certainly be called tasteless. Actually, though, it doesn't seem altogether inappropriate for an Arab filmmaker to address the rage and frustrations of the Arab street -- it's just a shame that he chose to wrap important issues in a veil of postmodern flim-flammery.
Mira Nair's politically charged contribution succeeds better because it has a lighter touch. It tells the true story of Salman Hamdani, an American-born Muslim who disappeared on Sept. 11, 2001, and was at first accused of involvement in the attacks by the FBI. (Six months later, his body was discovered in the rubble of the World Trade Center, where he had rushed to help victims escape.) "First they called you a terrorist, then they called you a hero," says his mother in the film. Nair manages to remind her audience how easy it is to fall back on racial stereotypes, but also offers a searing portrayal of one mother's grief in the face of an incomprehensible loss.
Other segments in the film offer fascinating windows into how other countries absorbed the events of Sept. 11. Bosnian Danis Tanovic, whose "No Man's Land" won last year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, offers a finely tuned piece about rural Bosnian women who gather on the 11th of every month, as it happens, to remember the horrors of Srebenica. In another segment, by Israeli Amos Gitai, an arrogant reporter stumbles onto the chaotic scene of a car bombing in Tel Aviv and becomes obsessed with filing her story. (When her editor tells her news is coming through of a big event in New York, she responds, "Who gives a shit?") As with Loach's, these pieces suggest that news is above all local, but also that violence and tragedy have the potential to unite people across borders.
A few directors focus on the personal rather than the political: There are two 9/11-related love stories, by French director Claude Lelouch and U.S. actor-director Sean Penn, as well as a strange entry by Japanese director Shohei Imamura, in which a Hiroshima war veteran deals with his psychological trauma by pretending to be a snake, and concludes that "there is no such thing as a Holy War."
