Press

New York Observer
27 January 2007
by Andrew Sarris
Source

Woman at War

Philip Haas’ The Situation, from a screenplay by Wendell Steavenson, is the first fictional film about the Iraq War since Irwin Winkler’s undervalued Home of the Brave, and, like its predecessor, it was shot in Morocco. Unlike Home of the Brave, however, The Situation is a view of the current situation in Iraq as seen through the eyes of a skeptical American foreign correspondent, who first runs into trouble by investigating what seems to be an American war crime, and then gets into real trouble when she decides to investigate an Iraqi sectarian political assassination.

Mr. Haas, who has previously specialized in literary adaptations with The Music of Chance (1993), from the novel by Paul Auster; Angels and Insects (1995), from the A.S. Byatt novella Morpho Eugenia; and Up at the Villa (2000), from the W. Somerset Maugham novella, has undertaken a project more in line with his earlier background as a documentarian. Even so, he says of his choice of project: “It struck me that if we could make a film during the U.S. occupation of Iraq that dealt with the effect of the war, both on the Iraqis and the Americans, and treat it as fiction as opposed to documentary, it would have a strong impact.

“There wouldn’t be historical perspective,” Mr. Haas continues, “but there would be a sense of urgency, and a sense that we might be able to understand what was going on even though we are in the middle of it.” His first step was to find a screenwriter who could offer an informed perspective on the occupation, along with the ability to create a fictional story. According to the production notes: “Then he came across an article by Wendell Steavenson, an Anglo-American journalist in her thirties who had lived in and reported from Iraq in the heat of the conflict.”

The result of this collaboration is The Situation, an inevitably dated contemplation of the complexities of the American occupation of Iraq, as if the story created for this film could be frozen in time to serve as a guide to American policy. Indeed, there is only one reason for us to watch The Situation, and that lies in the casting of the ineffable Connie Nielsen as Anna Molyneux, an American journalist who travels back and forth between the legendary Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Samarra to determine why a group of American soldiers threw two Iraqi boys off a bridge, with one of the boys drowning. Anna’s investigation goes nowhere. Accompanied by her translator, Bashar (Omar Berdouni), Anna visits one of her prime Iraqi sources, Rafeeq (Nasser Memarzia), whom she admires for his fair-minded view of the sectarian conflicts throughout Iraq. Rafeeq puts her in contact with the surviving boy in the bridge incident, and with the bereaved family of the drowned boy. By attending the funeral, Anna gets an insight into Samarra’s power structure when Tahsin (Saïd Amadis), the sheik whose word is law in the town, makes his ceremonial entrance, a handshake here, a hug there and a perpetual smile everywhere. By contrast, Anna is welcomed as both a friendly guest and as a target of suspicion. She is an American, after all, and who can trust the Americans?

Meanwhile, Anna’s boyfriend, intelligence officer Dan Murphy, is in Baghdad’s Green Zone, arguing with his superiors on the best way to curtail the violence and repair the country’s shattered infrastructure. After many dis­illusioning experiences with both Americans and Iraqis, Dan concludes with a statement that encapsulates the film’s bewildering narrative as well: “There is no truth, you know. It’s not about locking up all the bad guys. It doesn’t work like that. There are no bad guys and there are no good guys. It’s not gray, either. It’s just that the truth shifts according to each person you talk to.”

As Dan becomes increasingly frustrated and cynical, Anna begins to drift away from him into an intense friendship with an Iraqi photographer, Zaid (Mido Hamada). (This parallels Ms. Steavenson’s real-life liaison with an Iraqi photographer.) But all of Anna’s relationships are put on hold when Rafeeq is assassinated right in front of his home. Anna mistakenly believes that Rafeeq has been killed because of his association with her, and she vows to find his killer and write a story about her discoveries. Despite Zaid’s warnings, Anna and Bashar drive off with Walid (Driss Roukh), a sinister Samarra resistance leader, who has promised to assist Anna in her investigation.

Instead, Anna is, in effect, kidnapped by Walid, who shows Anna that Rafeeq was murdered not for sectarian reasons, but because he stood in the way of the killer’s courtship of a local beauty. Despite Anna’s not being in any real danger, Zaid and Dan collaborate to get American troops to raid Walid’s headquarters in order to “rescue” her. The consequences of this raid serve only to confirm the ultimate futility of all violent “solutions” to Iraq’s problems. My favorite character in the film is Bashar’s father Duraid (Mahmoud El Lozy), an Iraqi diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. For the information he gives Dan about Anna and Walid’s whereabouts, Duraid requests that Dan use his influence to get him reassigned to the United States Embassy in Australia, which is about as far as he can ever hope to get from Iraq.

Of course, the real situation in Iraq is not all that funny, and Mr. Haas’ and Ms. Steavenson’s The Situation doesn’t suggest that it is. Yet I fail to see what this mystify­ingly motivated independent production has to contribute to the ever-escalating and increasingly virulent debate over American policy in Iraq. Perhaps the point of the film is that there are no satisfactory answers, easy or otherwise.