Reviews

Film

Redacted

Directed by Brian De Palma, starring Patrick Carroll, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz

Of all the films being made about America's involvement in Iraq, evidently none is more loathed in the United States than Redacted. This "fictional documentary" by Brian De Palma, about an outrage committed by US troops on Iraqi civilians, is powerful, provocative, shocking and even slightly crazy in ways that may not be entirely intentional.

By the end of its 90 minutes, the china shop of taste and judgment is pretty well smashed to pieces by this great big bull of a film. Redacted starts off looking like a familiar anti-war film, comparable to movies by, say Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield, whose Battle for Haditha tackled a similar theme. But also, with its freewheeling handheld camerawork and shouty improv acting, it looks very similar to the no-budget "underground/political" movies of De Palma's youth: Greetings (1968) and Hi Mom! (1970).

There is something else going on there, too. Perhaps without quite realizing it, De Palma is applying his extensively developed idiom of slash, splatter and gore. After a while, Redacted starts to feel like a sort of politicized exploitation-horror picture. People might wonder if it is just the director's default position for representing violence, or if the wayward genius in him senses that, in the era of Abu Ghraib, this is the truest way of representing the essentially grotesque nature of the military adventure in Iraq. It is a media-collage, made up of many elements and fragments.

There is a video diary being made by one soldier who hopes to get into film school, also an earnest professional documentary made by imaginary French film-makers, complete with French subtitles; there is CCTV footage, fictional Arab TV, blogs, and gruesome footage of soldiers being killed and uploaded to al-Quaida-style websites. How and by whom this material has been assembled and cut together is, however, a mystery. The narrative concerns a demoralized unit of troops stationed in Samarra manning a checkpoint; they are at risk of death every day from what the British call roadside bombs, and the Americans IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices. When the men's popular sergeant is killed by one of these, two of the unit's most notorious Neanderthals set out on a revenge mission against the civilian population: to rape a 14-year-old girl whom they have seen passing through their checkpoint every day.

Broomfield's Battle for Haditha also focused on abuses committed by the US military, but his movie was far more lenient. The violence there happens in the fog of war, and the troops were, as individuals, arguably not entirely culpable. De Palma doesn't see it that way. His troops are just vicious criminals given free rein - people who in the civilian world would be locked up. De Palma's vision, or at any rate his emphasis, could be seen as simplistic, irresponsible. But haven't we all seen the Abu Ghraib photographs, showing soldiers clowning around with prisoners they have brutalized or killed? The De Palma approach - however crass or questionably motivated - might be in fact the correct one, and a liberal-humanist need for complexity or subtlety might be obtuse. The Guardian

Book

The Aeneid

By Virgil and translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin)

This tale of Aeneas' wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire has been translated into English many times, and Fagles, an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton who previously translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, comes to the fray well armed. Fagles renders the Latin hexameters of Virgil into variable lines with a capaciousness well suited to this vast story's ebb and flow.

New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 03/18/2008 page20)