The Devil's Double

Saw this movie today at Berlinale and was pleasantly surprised that as I walked out of it thought to myself that it's been a really long time since I saw a decent movie like this. Before I looked Uday/Latif up on the internet I had doubts about how close the plot was to reality, turned out to be quite interesting showing that, well everything in the movie has (kind of) happened. Makes it disturbing to know on a different level.

The depiction of Uday's psychotic character throughout the movie seems very real and does not spare or cheat the viewers any disturbing torture/abuse scenes. Some people might dislike this, some maybe even enjoy it.

That being said I liked the overall acting, both main and lesser characters did a good job. And on a side note: i found the movie sets and props were quite awesome.

btw: I can still remember the news of Uday's and Qusai's deaths back in 2003, but that meant little to me at that time. At least now i know.

I saw this movie not realizing that both leads were being played by one amazing actor!!! Dominic Cooper was exactly that: amazing. And deserving of an Oscar nomination when the time comes for handing them out. My film club was fortunate enough to have an interview with DC via Skype and found him to be as charming as he is talented.

Some seem to find fault with this film because it reminds them of Scarface. I don't get that at all. Perhaps they mean that at times it is operatic, over the top, but it is, after all, a biopic about a crazy man, and to me anyway, the parts of the film that deal with the double offset the high drama perfectly. Highly recommended!

There are many ways to describe Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's oldest son. None of them are positive.

The Devil's Double is a "take no prisoners" film that's as hard to watch as it is entertaining. It follows Latif Yahia (Dominic Cooper), an Iraqi soldier from an upper class family, who is plucked from the war to act as Uday's double. Uday (also played by Cooper), remembers the comparisons the two would get when they jointly attended grade school. He asks Yahia to be his double - for both political and personal reasons. Like his father, Uday is in a constant state of worry over an assassination attempt. Further, he wants to send Yahia on personal trips that he himself doesn't wish to attend. Yahia, kind and warm, refuses, but is forced to with the threat of harm to his family. Yahia is given cosmetic surgery and dentures to complete the look.

Yahia is thrust into Uday's world. This is a world filled with rape, torture, murder, drugs, sex and money. The lifestyle that the Hussein's live is more than Presidential - it is royal. Immediately, Uday claims Yahia as his own property. Uday has grown into a monster, getting whatever he wants and never having to deal with the consequences. Yahia is who he wants. The atrocities he witnesses because of Uday disgust him, but he is stuck in this nightmare. We watch as Uday preys upon young girls walking home from school. We watch as he guts his father's best friend at a party. We watch Yahia struggle with the lifestyle he is forced to live. Uday's fascination with Yahia grows stronger and it enters your mind that Uday may actually be in love with his double. This doesn't necessarily mean in a romantic way, but because his love of himself is so great, that he sees Yahia as apart of himself.

While the rest, as they say, is history, I certainly don't want to spoil the way the rest of the film plays out. This is a movie that you must see for yourself!

The acting in dual roles by Cooper, his first film as lead, is Oscar worthy. He gives both men their own voices, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, that instantly allow the viewer to tell them apart. Subdued and stoic, Cooper plays Yahia as a guilt ridden man, grappling with the life he has been thrust into. He plays Uday as a manic, hyper madman with a broken smile and a creepy laugh. You literally believe they are two different actors.

Latif is an ordinary man who is thrust into an extraordinary situation. An object of admiration for the President's son, he has no choice but to comply with the excruciating horrors that are put forth before him. Never once, however, do we seem his morals waver.

We know how it ends, but as with life, it's the journey that's important. The Devil's Double is the real life, Middle Eastern Scarface. Powerful, unsettling, thrilling and always entertaining, The Devil's Double, is quite easily one of the best movies of 2011.

From PopCultureWhore.com

Great deal of this movie is not true. Yet, this movie tells about 1/100th of the truth about the tyrant of Baghdad and his family in the 1990's. The other 99 parts are still under oblivion, thanks the the author and to the current chaotic regime of Baghdad. The movie is fine because even that 1% counts to understand what was really going on for the people in Iraq at that time.

But there is a serious drawback when someone watches this movie knowing that at the time of movie release in 2011, the main character and the author, Latif Yahia, was (and still is) glorifying the tyrant and calling on people to re-establish his era in Iraq. He actually has a YouTube channel filled with his political opinions and his shameless strange sympathy to the tyrant!! So whatever the author's claims about his political views, or about his own opinions of not having political views; he was not opposing the tyrant, and still not; he was one of the tyrant's followers and still is.

Now watching the movie knowing that the writer and main character stands there, it will make the audience uncomfortable and cautious to accept what's being told in this movie without questioning.

Aside from that, directing was weak in general, and the story is not as the original Arabic book (I Was A Son For The President), but a revised version of the English edition which was a revised version of the Arabic edition!

For example in the Arabic edition the main character was claimed to be a ranked army officer, in the movie he was just a soldier. In the original story it was claimed that the tyrant saw and examined his son's double for a few times, in the movie that wasn't happening. Now if this was a history book/movie then.. voila! There is a good definition for the person who says what he doesn't think and thinks what he doesn't say, and changes his saying/thoughts 3 times in a day...

I saw "The Devil's Double" at the Berlinale 2011. An unusual large number (over 300) stayed for the full 30 minutes of Q&A after the screening. The producer warned us that we should expect not too much of the political impact of this film. It is better (his words) to regard it as just a gangster movie. We also learned that the stand-in situation that seemed compressed here in a smaller time frame, in fact existed for a full 4 years. We saw that Latif succeeded in keeping his hands reasonably clean, but it cannot have been real for such a time span. We still may wonder how much of this life he was pulled-in, against his will and his nature, but nevertheless being part of it.

According to the film maker, what we saw was in more respects not completely accurate. Some freedom was exercised while portraying the situation in Baghdad at that time. The existence of stand-in's, however, was realistic and publicly known. That went as far as showing them openly, if only to confuse potential attackers. It certainly reduced the risk in public appearances, since one could never know whether you saw the real one, or a double dressed and acting like the real one.

There were also questions about using English as the prime language. The producer had some arguments in favor of the choices made. Firstly, raising a 50M budget for a movie with Arabic speaking actors, was considered a Mission Impossible. Also, English is generally accepted as the standard movie language, spoken by Roman emperors as well as aliens from other planets.

The Q&A also revealed some facts about how Dominic Cooper handled his double role. We now know that he played both roles on the same day, given the entourage and colleague actors present that day. He always played the "lunatic" parts first, and (without much time in between) the "Latif" parts shortly after that. Of course, there was a challenge in keeping track of the places where the counterpart actor stood at particular moments during the scene. Anyway, if he missed a few and looked in a wrong direction at some instances, I did not notice it and I think the same of other people seeing this film for the first time.

At various moments throughout the screening the notion crossed my mind that this movie could be construed as a justification of overturning the Sadam regime, or (in other words) as propaganda in favor of George W for a completed project in Iraq. In retrospect, I don't think such a hidden meaning was intended. The film was not against Sadam as a dictator in particular, but rather against dictators in general. They existed and ruled since the time of the Roman emperors (and probably before that), and still are ruling nowadays in countries all over the world. We see the wrong side effects of unlimited power. We also see how uncooperative people were regarded "that is the thanks we get for uplifting this country" (or variations thereof).

Political issues and hidden meanings set aside, we saw a well constructed story line, believable casting, and an inside view in the palace and its inhabitants at that time. One can argue about the torture, punishment and other violent scenes, that these better could be left out, or otherwise included implicitly by telling about it (without showing actual pictures). On the other hand, leaving these out would change the film too much into a costume drama, thereby reducing the impact it now will have on the average viewer. Anyway, it is easy for us to criticize choices being made by the film makers. In my opinion they did their job very well, all things considered.