From Eden To Misery

SON OF BABYLON (Blu-ray)
Dogwoof 

Release date: April 11th 2011
Certificate (UK): 12
Running time: 90 minutes
Original language: Farsi with English subtitles

Director: Mohamed Al Daradji

Cast: Shazada Hussein, Yasser Talib

Iraq is a country orphaned and widowed by forty years of war and genocide in Son of Babylon, the first feature film made in Iraq since the American-led invasion in 2003, and the fourth by esteemed Iraqi-Dutch director Mohamed Al Daradji, who escaped to Holland from his homeland in 1995 and later studied film in England.

It begins three weeks after the fall of Saddam, though for all the indifferent desolation of the desert it could, but for some incongruous pylons dividing the landscape, be any week since the Fall of Man.

A little boy and his grandmother shuffle wearily across the interminable geography like a hallucination in the hot quivering air. A panoramic sequence takes in their terrible isolation, agoraphobia echoing the triviality of individual life so appallingly conspicuous a feature of the recent history of this afflicted country.

The companions have the slow stooping nomadic bearing of those for whom the destination is unthinkably remote. It is indeed 500 miles to theirs: a prison where they hope to find Ahmed’s father, who they believe was captured and imprisoned by Hussein’s Baathist party during the first Gulf War.

Their journey begins auspiciously, with two unexpected kindnesses facilitating their search and counterpointing the black smoke and animal desperation they witness in smouldering Bagdad.

The child is a miracle of cheerful resilience and a constant comfort to his grandmother, who is stricken by the trauma of twelve years of uncertainty about the fate of her child. Between episodes of sudden delirium and spells of unreachable melancholy, she finds some repose in a heroic devotion to her grandson. There are several scenes of great tenderness between them, not least of which transpires as she washes him in anticipation of the reunion with his father.

But met with bitterest disappointment, their thoughts are forced to turn to the profusion of mass graves that are discovered with chilling frequency as the story staggers to an end.

The film is shot with austerity and patience befitting to the environment and subject. Everything is bleached and tired with the sun, and everyone is seen slowly trudging about as if the world had ended, which no doubt it had more or less for many people- most of whom, the film points out, were probably women or children. It is the living who are left to suffer.

There is no noun for a bereaved parent (as there are for bereaved children and spouses), perhaps because until fairly recently the loss of a child was too commonplace to necessitate distinction in language, or perhaps, as some have needed to suggest, because this suffering somehow defies designation.

Son of Babylon wants to show us that suffering, but also to show us the faint coruscation of occasional hope in kindness, in common mourning and, as the title hints, in myth and history.

Like many beleaguered itinerant heroes, Ahmed and his grandmother console one other with a story of better times. The magnificence of Babylon, the ruins of which can be found just 55 miles from the ruins of Bagdad, is frequently evoked. Ahmed is enchanted by the legend of the Hanging Gardens, built- as the tale goes- for a Queen who sought the respite of water in a desiccated land.

This is the paradise that they need to cope with their destitution; it is the Eden from which they are cast into such misery.

The modesty and sensitivity of the filmmaking combined with its subject somehow discourages critical scrutiny- though this is not to imply that there are any notable shortcomings which I might be respectfully reluctant to disclose. It just keeps you at the distance of real life; it can’t help but seem more than a movie.

This is a country we’ve seen burning on the news for eight years. It will have to suffice to say that Al Daradji has made an important and upsetting film which will reward your compassion.