REDACTED

By Oliver Pfeiffer / June 24, 2011

Available at Amazon for £9.98Brian De Palma has built a reputation on providing audiences with the ultimate depiction of events with his unique twist to virtuoso filmmaking. His use of multi-angled split-screen, voyeuristic panache with point-of-view framing and masterful tact with audacious long takes have made Sisters, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill and the less successful likes of Snake Eyes and Femme Fatale a more interesting visual experience. Therefore it is with great disappointment that, after the particularly strong emotional impact of Casualties of War some 20 years ago, and with all the technological advances at his disposal, he returns to the horrors at war genre with little evidence that he has maintained his masterly grip on cinematic aesthetics for the greater good of a story. Instead he provides, using admittingly impressive High Definition technology, a largely unconvincing re-telling of a disturbing event in 2006, which involved the rape and murder of a 15 year old Iraqi girl and the massacre of her family by criminally minded US troops in Baghdad. Redacted, (the term meaning to edit or censor down for publication), is fuzzy in both its moral depiction to bring to the screen a truthful account of the atrocity and in its overall political standpoint, coming across instead as a half-hearted TV movie that wouldn't look out of place on a late-night scheduling for Channel 5. The film commences with the digital journal of comrade (and film student wannabe) Private Angel €˜Sally€™ Salazar (Izzy Diaz) - who takes enthusiastic pride in capturing his fellow soldiers on location in Camp Carolina, Samarra. After a long drawn out period, drama finally erupts into proceedings when a car, driven by Iraqis, fails to stop at the checkpoint that the troops are administering. The vehicle is gunned down as a result. We later learn that the car was rushing a pregnant women to hospital but both her and her unborn child were killed in the shoot-out. The soldiers however have little time for remorse and later simply muse that "You can€™t afford remorse as you will get weak, and if you get weak you die". Revenge is ultimately orchestrated by the locals and a soldier is blown up in a cinematically calculated moment of unexpectedness. This leads to the brigade of soldiers enacting a night raid on a private home where they finger a middle-aged family man for questioning. That night they pressurize some of the comrades to go on a private mission back to the house with the intention of raping the father€™s 15 year old daughter. The events lead to the eventual killing of the girl and the massacre of the rest of the family. All these events and the resulting aftermath are pieced together using found footage - comprising of CCTV material, an ongoing French documentary, clips from an Arab TV channel, an Islamic Website and blog listings - all assembled to feel like we are discovering the material ourselves for the first time. However, a few tactical shock moments aside, the film is marred by the soap operatic performances of the non-specialist cast, (improvising to juvenile effect) making the entire show feel like a misjudged conundrum. As a result the tone is overtly preachy and insults the audience€™s intelligence, saddling them with a film that feels pretentious and severely patronizing. De Palma simply doesn't have the necessary technical restraint of his docu-drama peers, to convey anything but blasé filmmaking. Whereas in Battle for Haditha, Nick Bloomfield translated to screen the maddening horrors administrated by avenging marine warfare with gritty documentary style results, De Palma foils any similar emotional substance with a furiously dumbed down script and a misjudged taste for pretension; a fine baroque score used exquisitely in Stanley Kubrick€™s oil painted period masterpiece Barry Lyndon here feels misplaced and overused. Redacted caused quite a stir when it premiered at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, (where it subsequently earned the veteran director a Silver Lion for best director), but went on to do poorly at the box office and gathered a mixed critical response. De Palma was criticized for not including any material on the eventual fate of the soldiers involved in the killings. In his defense De Palma claims the film is fictional and in itself a target of being redacted, (the closing montage depicts photos of real victims but with their eyes blacked out to veil their identities). The film has also been critisized for its demeaning depiction of US servicemen as nothing more than cold-blooded criminals. What De Palma is ultimately striving for is a critique of the media through the misrepresentation of the war in Iraqi: and on this front he succeeds. Just don€™t expect a dramatic and naturalistic depiction to go with the representation, because you will simply find the jarring audio and visual images on display beyond comprehension. EXTRAS Special features are pretty sparse with an all too brief interview with De Palma who attempts to defend his project and some of the artistic choices he made with American interviewee Robert Wilonsky. Far more meartier material is provided in the form of an hour's worth of testimonies from refugee couples who have fled Irai and convey their sad personal loss and turmoil during this horrific war. The disc also includes a theatrical trailer and a stills gallery.

rating: 2