Saddam Hussein and his
sociopathic son Uday both employed body doubles.
Like many people in Iraq under Saddam, the doubles
were coerced into servitude in various ways,
particularly by threats to their families. Uday's
double, Latif Yahia, eventually managed to escape
the clutches of his twin/captor, but did so at a
great cost. True to his psychotic word, Uday Hussein
killed Latif's father as revenge for the escape and
"betrayal." Latif wrote a book about his
experiences, and this film is an adaptation of that
eponymous book.
The film is accurate in the sense that the events
pictured on screen really happened, but they did not
all happen in Latif's presence. The story got
embellished like a secret whispered around a circle.
When Latif wrote his book, he made it seem as if he
had been an eyewitness to many events that he
probably heard about second-hand. Because he was
Uday's double, it's not likely that they were often
in the same place together in public, yet this story
makes it seem as if they were rarely separated. The
screenwriter then offered some embellishments of his
own. Latif, for example, has told interviewers that
he was often with Uday in public because Uday was
rebelling against his father's insistence that he
use a body double. That explanation was no more
compelling to the screenwriter than it probably is
to you, so the film script overlays a story about
how Uday made the body double search his personal
project, and ended up falling in love with the
double as an extension of himself. You may then be
wondering how the film explains why, if Uday really
believed in the value of the program, the twins are
so often seen together in public, looking identical,
and thus blowing the cover. The script doesn't
really deal with that issue, which is confusing. We
are left to conclude that Uday was insane,
drug-addled, and reckless, and just didn't care if
everyone knew he had an identical twin. That may not
be accurate, but it's not unreasonable.
The film also shows Latif being an active
participant in, and in fact the instigator of, the
assassination attempt that left Uday partially
crippled. Although the gun battle happens in a
crowded urban area filled with Uday's bodyguards,
Latif simply walks away in slow motion, like a
character walking away from an explosion in a bad
action movie cliche. He is spotted by one of the
bodyguards, but that particular guy spares Latif's
life in repayment of a similar kindness in the past.
The assassination scene is pictured much as it
really happened, but I couldn't find anything in the
historical record to place Latif in that scene. I
haven't read his book, so I don't know if the
dramatic and highly cinematic embellishments were
created by Latif for the book, or by the
screenwriter for the film.
Not that it matters. The story pictured in the film
is substantially true; it's fascinating; and it's
told well. The most comparable
recent film is The Last King of Scotland.
If you liked that one, you'll like this one for most
of the same reasons. It held my attention from start
to finish and got me to the edge of my seat more
than once. Uday's abusive life is pictured in all of
its violent madness, thus graphically illustrating
Lord Acton's famous axiom about absolute power. Uday
picks up schoolgirls, rapes them, beats them, then
throws them away, often after they have died. He tortures and beats Iraqi
athletes who fail to win international
competitions. Waving his golden pistol and
backed by his entourage of thugs, Uday makes all the
glamorous guests at his birthday party get naked.
They comply because it's better to be naked and
alive than a spiffy corpse. In scene after scene,
Uday goes through a seemingly endless string of sex
partners and a bottomless reservoir of cocaine. He's
the Iraqi Scarface.
The casting was unusual. Englishman Dominic Cooper
played both Uday and Latif. French actress Ludivine
Sagnier, normally a blue-eyed blond, played an Iraqi
courtesan with an integral role in the story, as the
lover of both of the twins. She did change her hair
color for the role, but did not wear contacts. There
were those who criticized this casting, based on the
general modern belief that ethic roles should be
played by actors of similar ethnicity. I agree with
that in general, and I think we've come a long way
since Al Jolsen wore blackface, but I didn't see any
problem with the casting here. Except for Sagnier's
hair color, both actors performed with their natural
coloration and features, yet Cooper looked very much
like the real Uday Hussein.
I'd say that Cooper's
performances were two of the best this year.
