Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross, UK, 20063.5 out of 4 stars
Michael Winterbottom, as any article you read about him will tell you, is a man of many filmic styles, but one that he seems to keep coming back to, albeit in varying shapes and forms, is the docudrama. While his earlier film In This World used nonprofessionals reacting naturally to more-or-less fictional occurrences, this film uses actors to depict the true story of a handful of young British South Asian men who, while visiting Pakistan for a wedding, make an extremely ill-advised detour into Afghanistan right when the Americans start bombing it.
As you can guess from the title, these guys eventually end up in Cuba, where we are treated to a series of harrowing mistreatments and abuses of power that, let’s just say, made me even less proud to be an American than I already was. The docudrama style is effective here because the depictions of prisoner abuse stand on their own, without any need for manipulative music or embellishment of psychological detail. This isn’t to say that I value “realism” in film for its own sake, but in cases such as these, some form of it is probably the best way to get the point across. The decision to include interview segments is an interesting one, but it ultimately prevents this from becoming some kind of inscrutable art-film by allowing us some idea of what the prisoners were thinking.
It must be said that the entire film does not take place in prison camps, and the lead-up to this portion of the film is a quite captivating sort of travelogue, as these guys place themselves in the belly of the beast in a misguided effort to make some kind of difference. The film does a good job at conveying their shifting cultural identities, making their fate all the more compelling.
Source: Sony DVD
12 January, 11:55 PM
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