MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY (Laura Poitras, 2006)

Laura Poitras’s expert, underrated documentary about the January 30, 2005, national election in Iraq makes us a fly on a multitude of walls without any voiceover commentary to intrude on our attention or flight. Poitras interviews no one; her camera observes various official meetings, such as ones pertaining to the policing of the upcoming election, and a family in Baghdad, whose head, Dr. Riyadh, is running for a seat on the Baghdad Provincial Council. A Sunni physician who works at a free clinic, Riyadh is a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party. He opposes the U.S. invasion and occupation.
     Scenes of Riyadh with wife and daughters and at the clinic, treating children, stress an ordinary life. At home, he feeds chickens, shaves; a hand cuts a cake as a television news program airs; a daughter viscerally, fearfully reacts to the sound of an explosion outside. We also see Riyadh in other settings, such as at Abu Ghraib, where he expresses outrage that a 9-year-old child, along with other children, is incarcerated (“These children are dangerous,” a U.S. soldier claims), and at a meeting of his party, where the possibility is weighed (and, later, rejected) that democracy could be a tool for securing Iraq as an Islamic nation. It is even uncertain whether the election will take place; leaflets threaten “to wash the streets with the blood of voters.” Election Day, a Riyadh family member remarks, “I wonder if someone is filming voters so they can kill [voters] later.”
     A U.S. official stumbles by referring to the election as a “show”(!), and, in a bravura shot from above where we see the shadow of a U.S. plane cast on the populated street below, this image of oversight and protection ironically suggests a bombing run.

BLOW OUT (Brian De Palma, 1981)

Brian De Palma’s hommage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s cool, elegant, captivating Blowup (1966) translates image into sound. Rather than a photographer, a B-movie soundman is the protagonist this time; rather than photographs revealing a hidden murder, sound does this in Blow Out. The passage where, at night, Jack Terry silently records natural sounds, of an owl, for instance, is spellbinding and beautifully photographed. Then suddenly there’s the sound of a blowout; a car falls from a bridge into the river below, and De Palma, constitutionally unable to leave out Alfred Hitchcock, veers into Vertigo (1958) by having Terry dive into the water and rescue Sally. The driver, a presidential candidate, has drowned; is that a gunshot Terry hears when he amplifies and analyzes the sound? Sally, it turns out, is more than she seems; a conspiracy is afoot, Terry becomes embroiled in it, he falls in love with Sally, whose endangered life at the last he tries desperately to save. Too late! Terry’s idealism, which cannot cope with the realities of a sordid world, finds his original rescue of Sally, and his heart’s springing to life, all for nought.
     John Travolta, inept as usual, is unable to balance Terry’s cynicism and naïveté; but, if anything, Nancy Allen’s clichéd floozie is worse. Make of this what you will: De Palma applies “suspenseful” slow motion to Sally’s murder. Allen was De Palma’s wife. Their marriage lasted another year or so.
     Inorganic happy endings are impossibly sentimental; the same is true for inorganic unhappy endings. Sally’s end comes in a ludicrous burst of cheesy, swooning melodramatic opulence.
     There’s a creepy performance by creepy John Lithgow, and De Palma once again irritates with a sense of a shadowing danger imperiling lives. Overproduced, manipulative, empty, this is a terrible film.