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Iraq war blasts onto Venice screen with 'Hurt Locker'
2008-09-04
VENICE, Italy (AFP) - The war in Iraq blasted onto the screen at the Venice film festival on Thursday with a stunning portrayal by US director Kathryn Bigelow of the harrowing work of a bomb disposal team in "The Hurt Locker". With a screenplay by Mark Boal, an embedded reporter in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, the film depicts the "volunteer soldier who actually chooses to go to this conflict, and chooses this particular situation," Bigelow said. "My interest was to give this conflict a human face, to enable an audience to actually experience what a soldier experiences," she told a news conference. "There's accuracy and truth and realism that underscores all the images." In the film, daredevil Sergeant James, played by Jeremy Renner, leads the unit with chilling nonchalance as he dons an 80-pound "bomb suit" in Iraq's searing heat to approach homemade explosive devices packing terrifying payloads. The gut-wrenching scenes of the bombs they fail to reach, the mayhem catching civilians in the crossfire, the occasional human interaction between Americans and Iraqis, together paint a portrait of the futility of war. While "Hurt Locker" is "primarily observational as opposed to polemical," Boal said, "if we show some slice of the war accurately, then we've achieved what we set out to do." Boal also wrote the story for Oscar-nominated Iraq murder mystery "In the Valley of Elah," which screened here last year. Bigelow, who has directed Jamie Lee Curtis in "Blue Steel" (1990) and Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in "Point Break" (1991), added: "There's great, great tragedy in all wars, and this war is no exception. ... This is a very topical film about an underreported war." Bigelow needed little prompting to declare that said she "hoped and prayed" US forces would be withdrawn from Iraq, adding: "Only one man is capable of doing that, and that's (US presidential hopeful) Barack Obama." She said she hoped for a future in which "war becomes obsolete and diplomacy replaces it." "Hurt Locker" is among 21 films vying for the prestigious Golden Lion to be awarded on Saturday by a jury headed by German director Wim Wenders. Only two films in competition remain to be screened at Venice's 65th Mostra, US director Darren Aronotsky's "The Wrestler" starring Mickey Rourke, and a comedy by Italian director Pappi Corsicato, "Il Seme Della Discordia." The festival directed by Marco Mueller, embarking on his second four-year mandate, has begun recovering from the caustic reviews that assailed the films shown in the first half of the 11-day event. The screen brightened up this week with Argentine-Italian director Marco Bechis' "BirdWatchers" exposing the plight of Brazil's Guarani Indians in the face of the biofuels boom, and "Teza" by Ethiopia's Haile Gerima in which he revisits his homeland under the dictator Mengistu. And then US "Silence of the Lambs" director Jonathan Demme unveiled "Rachel Getting Married," an emotion-packed family drama starring Anne Hathaway as a recovering drug addict who shakes up her sister's wedding with an overdose of honesty about their dysfunctional family. Another potential winner is Russian director Aleksei German Jr.'s "Paper Soldier," a recreation of the Soviet effort to put the first man in space in 1961 -- Yuri Gagarin -- centring on the cosmonaut squad's chief doctor. Two Japanese films have also stood out -- Takeshi Kitano's whimsical "Achilles and the Tortoise" and Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated children's fantasy "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea."
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