★★★★☆
Four Stars
Last week’s exclusive iPlayer release of the bold new documentary by Adam Curtis, Bitter Lake, makes it nearly a four year gap since we were last gifted a full-length film by Curtis. During that period, following the debut of the three-part All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace in 2011, Curtis fans have had to make do with scraps: small five-minute features on Rupert Murdoch and ‘non-linear war’ for Charlie Brooker’s yearly Screenwipes, as well as characteristically rambling posts on his eclectic BBC blog (the more devoted might also have made the trip to Manchester to witness his collaboration with Massive Attack live in 2013).
Curtis is the great chronicler of postmodern chaos and he returns – if not on our televisions, at least our computer screens – in triumphant fashion, with a sprawling, beautiful treatise on the collapse of what he calls the ‘ordered world’, told chiefly through the prism of Afghanistan. It’s a frightening vision, but Bitter Lake is both visually arresting and deeply human.
“We live in a world where nothing makes any sense,” Curtis begins the film by declaring. “Those in power tell us stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense, and how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.”
It says much about Curtis’ filmmaking, and the strength of his aesthetic identity, that his documentaries lend themselves so easily to parody. There is certainly a house style. In Bitter Lake, Curtis doesn’t depart from the trademarks that make his films so instantly recognisable. Like his other recent works, it comprises his narration over footage excavated from deep within the BBC archives and elsewhere. It is, however, far longer, running slightly over two hours.
There is, as in his other films, the same predilection for the Arial typeface, all in capital letters, the characteristic fondness for juxtaposition and, of course, the very Curtis-like taste for both the surreal and the sentimental: truly bizarre looking footage of the Afghan version of The Thick of It is cut alongside poignant scenes of a father and his war-injured daughter. The effect is jarring.
Curtis briefly tutored Politics at Oxford before foregoing its cloistral hush for a weird kind of in-house position at the BBC and his films, appropriately enough, resemble intricately crafted essays. They generally begin the same way: Curtis disclosing his central argument, expounded over beautifully cut footage, before noting some crucial qualification (“But this was a fantasy…’”) He delights in contradiction and in the marriage of incongruent sound and image: in one scene Curtis tells us of a coup in Afghanistan, accompanying that with footage of play-fighting Afghan hounds. It doesn’t feel forced.
Bitter Lake covers much of the same ground as Curtis’ earlier works. Though mainly about Afghanistan, the film also detours into a story about the rise of neoliberalism and how oil money allowed banks to escape from the clutches of political regulation, echoing parts of The Trap and All Watched Over. This wouldn’t be a documentary by Curtis if Blair, Reagan or Thatcher didn’t feature and rather predictably they do, as Curtis rails against the ruthlessly simplified moral fables of good-versus-evil told to us by those in power in one of the documentary’s many interesting subplots.
Given that Curtis is so emphatic on the need for us to avoid simplifying reality, it is kind of odd of him to attribute the source of our modern disorder to one sketchy meeting between FDR and the King of Saudi Arabia (above a lake from which the film derives its name). Ultimately, however, Bitter Lake’s excellence comes not from the coherence of its narrative, but from the sheer aesthetic spectacle it provides. Curtis really is a collage artist of the highest order. And, besides: so what if his own story doesn’t make sense? It’s the kind of paradox one feels that Curtis would be proud of.
