Bitter Lake

Adam Curtis is in the business of selling veiled conspiracies. Or better giving conspiracy arguments, while masquerading as reasonable. I like the drastic drop in narration. That is an extra point for a film maker like Adam Curtis. No more "those in power" without giving names or "political leaders" with no references. This time is a blend of footage stitched together rather nicely.

Sadly this movie remains an Adam Curtis product. Curtis has wonderful and strong powers of hindsight. So 30-40 years later the mistakes are clear. The facts are mostly circumstantial. The data scarce. Bonus: the silent parts are mostly irrelevant to the main story and they are brought only to enhance the emotion.

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'And so the story goes, they wore the clothes to make it seem impossible. The whale of a lie like they hope it was.'

The music of the chameleonic, ambiguous, faded jaded star who fell to earth and sold the world is the key to this film, which challenges the very concept of a documentary.

Is this postmodernism in extremis or a clarion call to revolution? That question is the very point. Curtis presents a very clear and persuasive narrative of world events over, no, within a surreal AND undeniably real meditation that is at once document and dream. It is as true and fabricated and horrific as Apocalypse Now while being somehow less stagey. The footage is real. Most of it. (Although Bowie could be as stagey as any marionette or as sparsely bleak as the shellshocked junkie).

Bitter Lake is a documentary about Afghanistan. And the modern world. The media. Itself. Chameleon, corinthian, and caricature. It is an attempt to be as contemplative as Tarkovsky, as bitterly ironic, and yet it is clear that Curtis is trying to tell not (only) an artistic truth but a historical truth.

The good men of tomorrow, according to the Western forces, turned out not to be what they seemed, buying their positions with heroin and trust. The complexities of Afghanistan's politics and the relation of Afghanistan to world politics, these are not just tackled by Bitter Lake, they are evoked. Is the lake beyond comprehension or can we come to terms with it and ourselves? Bitter Lake is never as glib as that question. You could say it was postmodern and experimental, but it seems too well constructed, or perhaps dreamed, to dissolve into a sea of perspectives. Perhaps it is something new. A myriad that reassembles itself into a guided missile. It certainly feels vital, important, but from these shores the eventual impact is... far off. I might just slip away.

Bitter Lake is for the most part a history of interventions in Afghanistan by the US, the UK and also Russia since halfway the 20th century.

The film follows the extremist Islamic idea of Wahhabism. It was transported east through the Arabic world, influencing the formation of the Taliban, Al Quaida and ISIS. All because the US accepted the idea in the partners they dealt with while looking for oil.

It's an interesting documentary, told mostly chronologically. This allows Curtis to compare events through time, for example the Russian invasion to the more recent western occupation.

A lot of the footage that is shown is filmed in Afghanistan and this stresses the constant violence the land has to witness. Because of the many groups involved in each area, enemy is a diffuse term there.

The film is advertised as epic on the BBC Iplayer but could have been shorter. In the first half there were shots in between the narrative that could have been left out. But all in all Bitter Lake offers a perspective that is great at telling us something about the modern world and a lot about Afganistan.

There are a lot of very detailed and thoughtful reviews of this movie if you want more help determining if you should watch this film. I want to talk about how to watch it. Because you should, if you can stand it. I thought some of the information on the history of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia and how it affected Afghanistan to be interesting and relevant.

But, as with a few other reviewers, I felt a lot of the footage was unnecessary and distracting. We learn that things aren't always as black and white as they presented to us in news stories - that the messages have been simplified to make it easier to grasp and perhaps to hide mistakes that have been made. But in this "experimental" documentary, the explanations are muddied with clips that perhaps are designed to make us think, but in my case a lot of my thoughts were, "What is the point of this?"

"Bitter Lake" could be an important movie if it were a lean 80 or 90 minutes long instead of 2 1/4 hours.

But if you try watching and find yourself losing patience at times as I did, or if you are hesitant to even start watching, I have a suggestion. Watch the screen only when the narrator voice-over is present. This will give you the bulk of the orderly, historical stuff. Look away when it shifts to people dancing, or a soldier balancing a small bird in his hand. Do text messages during the comedy movie clips, or when the camera focuses for 30 solid seconds on the death stare of a "freedom" fighter. Obviously, this will be more easily achieved watching at home than in a theater, and cost a bit less, also.

Bitter Lake strives for historic synopsis over caustic polemic, despite its comprehensive narrative holding a somewhat narrow perspective. Interestingly, some of the more controversial topics that media cannot resist spinning into an overwhelming assault, like farts saturating an enclosed room, are blown past with refreshingly little fanfare while occasionally approaching, though not brazenly crossing lines into conspiracy-theory territory. A couple of times, just as I would start to feel that old familiar twinge of impending blame-placing political distraction infesting our network and cable news, it seemed the film would deftly shift gears to surpass the tumult. The film is slick and stylish, perhaps to the point of self-indulgence, but that also really sets this doc apart.