WASHINGTON, 6 September 2003 — For the film “September 11,” which used to be known as “11’09’’01,” French producer Alain Brigand asked 11 filmmakers, including Sean Penn, Ken Loach, Claude Lelouch and Samira Makhmalbaf, to make 11 shorts dealing with the events of that day. Each film runs precisely 11 minutes, 9 seconds plus 1 film frame.
There’s something appealing about this premise and yet also something ominous and unpalatable. For a great many people, and not just Americans, the tragedies of that day are still too emotionally devastating to swallow anyone’s filmic interpretation — particularly if that interpretation smacks of political hostility or admonition.
If “September 11,” which was rushed into production in time for the first anniversary in 2002, proves anything, it is that no event touches people uniformly. We are all too lost in our own perspectives and prejudices to share the same kind of grief. (The film’s slowness in arriving here proves how difficult it was for it to secure American distribution.)
This collection of films, from a culturally wide variety of artists, exudes only begrudging doses of compassion and pity. Most of the time, it seems, the compassion is eclipsed by cultural estrangement, sanctimonious finger-wagging, political disingenuousness or outright artistic self-absorption. And even by apolitical artistic standards, the filmmakers’ visions seem limited, incomplete. Perhaps in the rush to make their deadlines for this film, they didn’t have enough time to fully develop their ideas. There’s a disconcerting mix of veiled (and not-so-veiled) hostility and mediocrity.
Penn’s offering, while it doesn’t attack America, uses the tragedy as the flimsiest of excuses for a story in which a mourning widower (Ernest Borgnine) is ironically buoyed by the toppling of the World Trade Center. French director Lelouch creates a nice premise: A deaf woman in New York, right near Ground Zero, walks around in her apartment without realizing what’s happening. But Lelouch gets lost in her search for a tour guide in the dust rather than the bigger tragedy around her.
British director Loach makes his movie from a smart but emotionally removed perspective: That, on the same date in 1973, the American government promulgated the fall of Chilean Socialist leader Salvador Allende. Is there a chance he could step outside his agenda, just for 11 minutes? Apparently not.
Iranian director Makhmalbaf’s film, in which a teacher tries to explain what happened in New York to her class of refugee Afghan children, is similarly frustrating. The movie deliberately avoids a simple gesture of sorrow. It comes close, then flits away. Indian director Mira Nair lets us know about a real Pakistani American mistaken for a terrorist but who actually was a hero in the New York melee. Idrissa Ouedrago (from Burkina Faso) makes a lighthearted fable about African boys who decide to hunt down Osama Bin Laden. And there’s no saying what was on the mind of Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, who goes on some mystical tangent about a killed US Marine and a Palestinian suicide bomber, or Japanese director Shohei Imamura, who creates a drama about a Japanese soldier in World War II who is convinced he has become a snake.
All in all, the movie, which includes works by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iqarritu, Israeli director Amos Gitai and Danis Tanovic (from Bosnia), is a crashing letdown. Anyone whose heart was hurt by 9/11 already knows that, while many wept for the thousands who died in the attacks, others laughed and rejoiced. Now they’ll learn that others turned their reactions into inconsequential film shorts.
Banality, it seems, ultimately washes over everything.
