Category: News/Opinion

By Joe Bendel. Somewhere in the lower depths of Hell, Saddam and Uday Hussein are watching this film as they slowly roast on their spits. Graphically dramatizing the sadistic brutality and drug-fueled hedonism of Saddam Hussein’s ruling family, Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double lands the first unequivocal knock-out punch at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it has one more can’t-miss public screening this Saturday.

Latif Yahia had the profound misfortune to resemble Saddam’s psychotic son Uday. Even more despised than his despot father, Uday recruited Yahia to serve as his double. It’s not like the Iraqi officer is given any choice in the matter. He could either relinquish his identity to serve as Uday’s public doppelganger or his family would be tortured to death in Abu Ghraib. He knows the junior Hussein means it only too well. As his first tutorial on being Uday, Yahia is forced to watch videotape of his shadow self at work as the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, raping and tormenting the nation’s athletes. It is a disturbing scene, but Double is just getting started.

Beginning during the Iran-Iraq War and continuing through the first Gulf War, Double forces the audience to witness Uday’s crimes up-close-and-personal. We watch as he abducts underage school girls straight off the street and violently rapes newlywed brides still in their wedding dresses. Truly, there is really no perversion too heinous for him.

Obviously, being a party to such crimes – albeit against his will – takes a profound emotional toll on Yahia. While his assignment progressively eats away at his soul, Yahia embarks on a dangerous affair with Sarrab, Uday’s favorite amongst his women on-call. Yet, even without their assignations, it is clear that life in the House of Saddam is always brutish and short-lived.

It is one thing to intellectually concede the crimes of the Husseins, but it is quite another to confront it in such visceral and immediate terms. To its credit, Double waters down nothing. Nor does it indulge in any anti-American cheap shots. This is about Uday (and to a much lesser extent Saddam) Hussein’s crimes and Tamahori and screenwriter Michael Thomas offer them absolutely no mitigating circumstances or justifications. Adding to the film’s newsworthiness, the extent to which it depicts the Iraqi Olympic Committee as an extension of Saddam’s secret police will be a genuine eye-opener for many. (Though no fan of the Husseins, it is important to note that the real life Yahia is also a vocal critic of the CIA and Operation Iraqi Freedom.)

In a truly intense dual role that will probably take years of analysis to recover from, Dominic Cooper gives a career-making performance as Uday and Yahia. In terms of mannerisms (and behavior), his Uday bears a strong resemblance to Pacino in Scarface. Twitchy and erratic, he is an unsettling presence, even when apparently at rest. By contrast, Cooper portrays Yahia as a serious slow burner, outraged and slowly deadened by the atrocities surrounding him. Providing further seasoning, French actress Ludivine Sagnier is at her most sensual ever as Sarrab, far eclipsing her sex appeal in films like Mesrine and Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two.

No, Double is not a subtle film. Likely making Double even less palatable to critics, Tamahori and cinematographer Sam McCurdy rendered the film in a slick, visually dynamic style reminiscent of the 1990’s glory years of Michael Mann and Tony Scott. Indeed, this is a major production, with art director Charlo Dalili perfectly recreating the ostentation and tackiness of Saddam’s palaces.

Predicting unfavorable reviews for Double from the rest of the Sundance press corps is a pretty short limb to climb out on, as the film’s implications will threaten many worldviews. However, Double constitutes bold filmmaking on several levels. Double also serves as a pointed corrective to the Doug Liman-ACLU-PEN sponsored “performance-installation” on the alleged use of torture by the American government scheduled this Saturday. For those in Park City who really want to understand the horrors of torture, skip the performance art and try to scrounge a ticket for Double this Saturday (1/29) at the Prospector Square Theater as a Premiere selection of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

[UPDATE: Hollywood Reporter says today that The Devil’s Double is close to getting picked up for distribution, with a potential deal in the works with either Relativity Media or Fox Searchlight.]

Posted on January 25th, 2011 at 5:05pm.

By Joe Bendel. To this day, Steinway pianos are assembled by hand in a long, painstaking process. The resulting fractional differences give each Steinway its own unique individual sound. The preferred choice of many concert pianists, Steinways are works of art in themselves. One vintage 1882 Steinway might even save an elderly antique woodworker’s business in Yossi Madmony’s Restoration, which screens during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Yaakov Fidelman knows wood better than anyone. His partner Maxim Malamud knew people. With his sudden death, their jointly owned restoration business may not survive the loss of its public face and bookkeeper. Equally troubling, Fidelman begins to suspect his son Noah might have considered his late partner more of a father than the senior Fidelman.

Indeed, Fidelman and his ambitious attorney son have never been close. It is a void Fidelman’s mysterious new assistant would like to fill. The homeless Anton is a former pianist from a well-to-do family. In fact, it is he who recognizes the potential value of the Steinway languishing in the corner of the workshop. Perhaps as a musician who no longer plays, it makes sense that Anton would be attracted to Noah’s pregnant wife, Hava, a former Israeli teen TV idol who no longer sings. Steadily mounting resentments all lead to an almost Biblical confrontation between Fidelman’s metaphorical son and his blood offspring.

While the conflicts of Restoration are deeply seated, the film is the very picture of elegant restraint. Unfolding at a stately pace, Madmony focuses like a laser-beam on Fidelman’s quiet soul-searching. Sasso Gabay subtly anchors the film as the difficult craftsman, suggesting much inner turmoil, but never betraying the character’s taciturn reserve. It is a wholly engrossing character study.

Lushly lens by cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov and featuring a pitch-perfect chamber-music score by Avi Belleli, Restoration represents film fully realized as fine art. Considering that the Israeli film industry is arguably more reflexively anti-Israel than Hollywood, it is also quite a pleasure to see such an apolitical cinematic import from the country. Wise and sad, Restoration is a film for mature adults (in the best sense of the term) that is likely to have a long life on the Jewish Film Festival circuit following Sundance. Highly recommended, it screens again in Park City on Wednesday (1/26) and Friday (1/28).

Posted on January 25th, 2011 at 2:11pm.

By Joe Bendel. The media constantly assures us that Muslim women actually find veils and headscarves liberating or comforting in some way. However, one young Iranian woman cannot wait to tear it off once she is safely at home. This leads to some tense moments when she accidently locks herself out of the family flat with head uncovered in Saba Riazi’s short film The Wind is Blowing on My Street, which screens as part of Short Program II at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

Riazi’s second year NYU graduate school film tells a relatively simple story, but it raises a number of significant issues regarding the state of (perhaps not-so) contemporary Iran. Noticing her predicament, a young man of college age newly arrived in the neighborhood keeps her company, even though each passer-by is a very real cause for concern.

The misogynist implications of a society that makes an uncovered head a legitimate crisis are inescapable. However, Wind clearly suggests that Iran will be a heavy price for its extremism, precipitating a study-abroad exodus of its best and brightest students seeking escape from the regime’s intolerance, like the film’s two lead characters. Yet maybe the film’s most telling commentary comes in the closing credits, in which the lead actress is simply billed as “anonymous.”

Riazi helms with a deft touch, in no way overplaying the potential menace of the situation, but never letting viewers forget the vulnerability of the young woman’s position, either. She also elicits some quite natural, down-to-earth performances from her principal leads. A very good short film, Wind is one of several bold Iranian themed selections at this year’s Sundance. It screens again with Short Program II on Friday (1/28) and Saturday (1/29).

Posted on January 25th, 2011 at 1:52pm.