De Palma spills and Clooney thrills at star-studded Venice Film Festival
Redacted is billed as a “fictional story inspired by true events”, following a group of US soldiers stationed in Iraq who rape a teenage girl and slaughter her family.
It is based on the notorious real-life incident in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in which soldiers raped a 14-year-old schoolgirl before setting her body alight and shooting dead her parents and five-year-old sister.
Other events retold on film include the fatal shooting of a pregnant Iraqi woman at a military checkpoint as her brother was driving her to hospital.
And in one graphic scene shot in the style of an al-Qaida internet video, a sobbing US soldier is beheaded.
The film ends with a montage of real-life photographs of Iraqi war victims, including maimed and dead women and children.
The final picture is an image of the real-life 14-year-old rape victim.
De Palma said he hoped seeing such images would alert Americans to the truth of what is going on in Iraq.
Until now these images have been censored, he claimed.
The film’s title refers to the process of editing out material for legal or other reasons.
Speaking in Venice, the director of Scarface, The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible said: “The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what’s happening in Iraq to the American people.
“Unlike Vietnam, when we saw the destruction and sorrow of the people we were maiming and killing, and soldiers coming home in body bags, we see none of that in this war. It’s all out there on the internet, it’s not in the mainstream media. The media is now part of the corporate establishment.” De Palma made a 1989 film Casualties of War about atrocities in Vietnam.
He said: “I remember picking up Life magazine and seeing pictures that would horrify me about the Vietnam war. We don’t have those pictures in America now. The pictures are what will stop the war. He likened TV news coverage of the conflict to reality TV shows such as Love Island.
“We have one reality show after another on TV, people think that’s actually happening. I switch on and see these people whispering on a lonely island in the South Pacific as if they’re the only people there, when of course they’re surrounded by producers and directors. This is a constructed reality. All the images we have are constructed on TV and whitewashed and redacted,” he said.
De Palma trawled YouTube and read soldiers’ blogs to research the project. Shot in stark high definition video, Redacted is arranged as a montage of films shot from differing viewpoints — a home movie made by one of the soldiers, a website run by the wives of military personnel and Arab TV reports.
Ironically, legal constraints meant some material in the film was itself redacted — the faces of the victims in the closing photographs are partially blanked out.
I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to these suffering people.
“The great irony of Redacted is that it was redacted,” the director said.
He said of the Bush administration: “The architects of this war were right there on the ground during Vietnam — of course, they didn’t serve, but they observed. Maybe they feel if we’d stayed in Vietnam we would have won the war, I don’t know. But are we going to repeat history over and over again? It seems quite obvious to me we shouldn’t be there.”
De Palma cast relatively unknown actors as the army recruits and filmed on location in Jordan.
The two soldiers who carry out the rape do so after a night drinking whisky and playing cards, just as their real-life counterparts did.
Throughout the film they refer to Iraqis as “sand niggers” and treat the native people with contempt, talking of the excitement of making their first “kill”.
They embark on their rape and murder spree to take revenge after a colleague is blown up by a roadside bomb.
De Palma began the project after reading about the incident in March 2006 when members of the 101st Airborne Division raped a 14-year-old girl before slaughtering her and her family.
“How could these boys have gone so wrong? In searching for answers, I read soldiers’ blogs, books, watched soldiers’ home-made war videos, surfed their websites and their YouTube postings. It was all there, and all in video,” De Palma said.
Two US soldiers involved in the Maymudiya attack have been jailed for a total of 190 years. The alleged ringleader Steven Green was honourably discharged from the army due to a personality disorder and is awaiting trial as a civilian. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty if he is convicted.
Meanwhile, another top Hollywood headliner was also on the programme in the corporate thriller Michael Clayton, with George Clooney in the title role.
Clooney plays the “fixer” for an enormous New York law firm, sorting out embarrassments behind the scenes for its mega-clients. Critics say the “gotcha” at the end is worth the price of admission.
But while De Palma and Clooney were the marquee names on offer Friday, they had to share some of the public spotlight with the first Italian selection of the year, Nessuna Qualita agli Eroi (Fallen Heroes).
Male nudity is practically hum-drum in this year’s Venice lineup, but Fallen Heroes stands out by showing rising star Elio Germano naked and in an evident state of arousal. And also this week, Taiwan’s Ang Lee unveiled his spy thriller Se, Jie (Lust, Caution), a tense drama set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the 1940s.
An erotic form of the Stockholm Syndrome — developed through a series of emotionally ambiguous sex scenes — causes a resistance spy played by novice actress Tang Wei to save the life of a powerful political figure she was meant to set up.
Also screened this week was British director Kenneth Branagh’s Sleuth starring Michael Caine and Jude Law, with a crisp screenplay by English playwright and Nobel literature laureate Harold Pinter.
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