Dir. Lee Tamahori, Belgium, 2011, 108 mins
Cast: Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Raad Rawi,
Review by Carol Allen
The film is based on Latif Yahia’s autobiographical book about his experiences, when he was plucked from the Iraqi army in 1987 and forced to act as ‘fiday’ – or body double – to Saddam Hussein’s son, the notoriously decadent and sadistic Uday Hussein, whose excesses appear to have outstripped even those of his father.
At the centre of the film is Dominic Cooper, playing the dual roles of Latif and Uday. Cooper is a very talented young actor, who already has a good body of work behind him. This is a great opportunity for him and one which he seizes with great skill and energy. Perhaps understandably, he has more of a grip on the showier role of Uday – colourful villains are always more fun to play and Cooper plays him to the hilt without ever lapsing into caricature. As Latif the double he has a more difficult task, in that the character is more introspective and the script doesn’t really take us into his inner life and background as much as it could have done. The scenes where Cooper is playing both characters himself against himself are though impeccably convincing both from a technical point of view and in the actor’s dual performances.
This must have been a very difficult book to adapt for the screen, as it was probably very episodic. That is certainly the impression one gets from the way the story is told here. The film lacks a strong sense of structure – just one incident after another, which don’t always develop our understanding of Latif – while with regard to both the characters, it would have been helpful to have learned more about their backgrounds and what has made them the men they are. Philip Quast doesn’t have a lot to do as Saddam and it would have been good to have seen more of Latif’s father (nicely suggested performance wise by Nasser Memarzia) and the rest of his family. Sagnier as Sarrab, Uday’s mistress with whom Latif forms a relationship, doesn’t have a lot of life or depth either, while some of the other minor characters such as Udi’s advisor Munem (Rawi) are potentially interesting but don’t have enough opportunity to develop. All of which makes the film overall a bit sparse and unsatisfying in its narrative.
There are though some very strong sequences, as in the story of the bride that Uday defiles on her wedding day. And the film is spectacular to look at. Tamahori effectively suggests the glittering decadence of Baghdad in the eighties as being reminiscent in some respects of Caligula’s Rome, as in a sequence where Uday forces the sophisticated visitors to a night club to strip naked for his pleasure, but despite such flourishes, the film never goes over the top into tastelessness.
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