What a difference a year makes in the ebb and flow of political tub-thumping.
At the 2002 Venice and T.O. film fests, angry commentators bayed at the moon over the "anti-American" 11'09"01 -- a pastiche of 11-minute films by 11 international filmmakers on the subject of Sept. 11.
The movie is finally getting released here, to a world less inclined to walk on eggshells when talking about America.
Justified or not, there's plenty of indisputable anti-Americanism around these days. In that context, it's hard to see what the fuss was about in a movie where only two of 11 filmic statements are at all critical of U.S. foreign policy (and only one of the two is coherent), while one targets things domestic (Mira Nair's film about the persecution of Muslims, including one who was an actual Sept. 11 hero).
11'09''01 is a hard movie to grade, since the short films range in quality and style from wonderful absurdist metaphor (a teacher in an Afghan refugee camp in Iran tries to explain Sept. 11 to her students, who think somebody fell down a well) to breathtakingly dumb metaphor (I'll get to Sean Penn's film in a minute), to hilarious satire to theatre of the obscure (Shohei Imamura's tale of a "snake man").
First, the alleged offenders. Egyptian Youssef Chahine offers a thuddingly unsubtle story of a filmmaker who, on Sept. 11, meets the ghost of a young U.S. Marine killed in the Beirut terrorist attack in 1983. He lectures the ghost about America's bloody history, but follows him back to Arlington cemetery to hug the Marine's father and Lebanese-born fiancee. On the sidelines, the ghost of a suicide bomber seethes. Can you say "conflicted?"
Ken Loach revisits another Sept. 11 event -- America's bloody involvement of the CIA-backed Chilean coup. This particularly angered those who didn't see the relevance of other atrocities in a movie about this one.
But if you consider the tortured homes of the filmmakers -- Bosnia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East -- it's easy to see why they'd view Sept. 11 less as a singularity, than as another sizable signpost on a road to hell.
My favourite filmlet was by Burkina-Faso's Idrissa Ouedraogo, a hilarious bit about a bunch of kids who see someone in a market they think is Osama bin Laden and plan to capture him for Bush's $25 million reward.
The most cringe-inducing: Sean Penn's tale of a demented widower (Ernest Borgnine) who lives in the shadow of the Twin Towers and sees the sun for the first time as they fall. Even his dead flowers bloom.
It's brilliantly shot like everything else in 11'09''01. But the analogy is sophomoric in the extreme.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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