![]() The narrative concerns a demoralised 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. How and by whom this material has been assembled and cut together is, however, a mystery. 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-Qaida-style websites. It is a media-collage, made up of many elements and fragments. I am still not entirely sure 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. After a while, Redacted starts to feel like a sort of politicised exploitation-horror picture. Perhaps without quite realising it, De Palma is applying his extensively developed idiom of slash, splatter and gore. There is something else going on there, too. 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). 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. ![]() This comes to full, horrible flower in the final sequence of still photo-images of butchery accompanied by an ominous and deafening orchestral score. I've seen it twice now - at the Venice film festival last year and at a screening in London - and both times I could feel huge numbers of people, hawks and doves alike, being gripped, baffled and appalled by its sheer semi-controlled offensiveness. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. Of all the films being made about America's involvement in Iraq, evidently none is more loathed in the United States than Redacted. ![]()
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