Beyond the Multiplex

A documentary masterpiece that shows us Iraq as it truly is. Plus: Ed Harris as Beethoven, and an exegesis on the word "fuck."

By Andrew O'Hehir


Nov. 9, 2006 | Like many of you, the staff here at Beyond the Multiplex world HQ was up late on Tuesday night parsing electoral returns in rural Montana, the outer suburbs of St. Louis and inner-city Richmond, Va. As some readers are eager to remind me, the job of this column is to rise above the mire of politics, to hark only to the highest vibrations of Apollo's lyre, plucked in the empyrean realms of Art.

Well, forget it. As it happens, this week's most important new independent film is James Longley's documentary "Iraq in Fragments," winner of numerous festival awards, including Sundance prizes for directing, cinematography and editing. There hasn't been much audience for Iraq docs so far -- who wants to see a film about a place we all wish we'd never heard of? -- and I don't know that Longley's film will change that. But it's head and shoulders above the rest in its clarity, intimacy and poetry, and it illustrates the dreadful predicament America has created in Iraq, which drove so many angry people to the polls on Tuesday.

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"Iraq in Fragments": Real life viewed as classic drama, in the ruins of post-Saddam Iraq

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" wrote a bemused but curious conquering general, the leader of an invading empire, some time back. He might have been talking about 21st century Iraq, although that country has been conquered by Donald Rumsfeld's legions only in the most technical sense. James Longley's "Iraq in Fragments" tells its story of life after Saddam in three discrete narrative segments: one in a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad, another in the Shiite stronghold of Nasariyah, and the last in the rural Kurdish north.

This level of organization already raises Longley's film above purposefully bewildering Iraq documentaries like "My Country, My Country" or "The Blood of My Brother," where we never quite know what's going on or what viewpoint the people in the film represent. But that's not why "Iraq in Fragments" is such a terrific film, something close to a documentary masterpiece.

Longley lived among his subjects for months at a time, earning their trust. He interviewed them extensively about their beliefs and life experiences and uses their own words as a running narration to what we see on the screen. His cinematography is daring, intimate, often harshly beautiful. He isn't afraid to build each segment of the film as a coherent narrative, full of pathos and adventure, so that "Iraq in Fragments" often feels like a dramatic film. A 34-year-old American who was trained at the legendary VGIK film institute in Moscow, Longley clearly sees the documentary film as a constructed act, an interpretation, rather than a morally neutral, all-seeing eye.

His first fragment tells the story of an 11-year-old Baghdad boy named Mohammed, a character straight out of Charles Dickens. Mohammed cannot read or write; he's in first grade for the fifth straight year, with no prospects of moving up. He works in an auto garage in the impoverished Sheik Omar neighborhood of old Baghdad, for a boss who is alternately affectionate and horribly abusive. His father has disappeared, and he keeps dropping out of school to support his mother and grandmother.

Mohammed is still young enough to believe he will escape this neighborhood and his current life -- he dreams of becoming an airline pilot, so he can fly to someplace far away and beautiful -- but he wanders its chaotic, increasingly violent streets in a mood of deepening fear and uncertainty. The men who hang around his garage all day are totally fatalistic. America only came to Iraq for their oil, they tell Longley, so why don't they take the oil and leave us alone? "The future will be worse than the past," one says. "Today is better than tomorrow." Maybe Saddam abused and oppressed us for 35 years, another adds, but he was still better than anarchy and civil war.

After the cynical Sunni philosophers of the auto shop, Longley shows us the firebrand Shiites of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army. There's no fatalism here; Sadr's men are energized and optimistic. They're on fire for Islam, devoted to civil disobedience against America and what they regard as a puppet Iraqi regime, half a step away from armed revolution. Even though Sadr's lieutenants reportedly suspected that Longley was a CIA spy, they allowed him remarkable access to meetings, rallies, battle zones and impromptu actions, like the capture and beating of several men accused of selling alcohol in Nasariyah's central market.

This central section is both exciting and terrifying, but it's clear that whatever the future of Iraq may hold, Sadr's Shiite movement will play a crucial part. (And no peace will ever be possible that doesn't include it.) You can't even say there's an ironic subtext here; it's all text. The United States occupation has bred a vigorous, populist political movement, which considers itself democratic and is not in any way allied with al-Qaida. Awesome, right? Except that it's also a stridently fundamentalist, anti-American movement that venerates the Ayatollah Khomeini. Isn't it the first and most stupid rule of all human relations that what goes around, comes around?

Attached to the film as a sad, gorgeous coda is the story of a Kurdish sheepherding family in a remote northern village known as one of Iraq's historically Jewish communities. (Few if any practicing Jews remain in the area today, but the family in the film may be descended from Jewish residents who converted to Islam early in the 20th century.) Following the chaos and fervor of the Shiite revolution, this segment is an intimate, sunset-hued story of father and son, affected only distantly by politics or religion.

The father is an elderly man who believes he will die soon, but dreams of leaving an independent Kurdistan for his teenage son. The son harbors a dream of attending medical school, but has begun to face the truth: Herding sheep, and cutting bricks at a local brick oven, is his only future. Kurdish residents turned out by the thousands for the Iraqi elections of 2005, but autonomy for the Kurds can only mean the partition of Iraq, which, as someone in the film notes, was a scheme first proposed by the British during World War I.

Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, "Iraq in Fragments" captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair. It offers no prescriptions, and the ideology you bring to the film may well determine what you see in it. If it has a lesson for Americans, it might be: We bloodied our hands in this place. Before we try to wash them off and walk away, we owe these people the respect of seeing them as they are.

"Iraq in Fragments" is now playing at Film Forum in New York and opens Nov. 10 in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington; and Nov. 17 in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.