THE PRISONER, OR HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR

Directed by Michael Tucker, Petra Epperlein

Reviewed by Matthew C. Brown
September 8 2006

The Prisoner was preceded by Sari's Mother, a 20-minute documentary vanity piece created, as I understand it, at the request of the Toronto Film Festival's documentary programmer to fill some empty time before the not-quite-a-feature documentary, The Prisoner. Sari's Mother is made of discarded segments (about a ten-year-old boy being neglected by the Iraqi medical system) of a longer documentary called Iraq in Fragments, and was apologized for profusely by the director before the film began. Does any of this sound like a paritcularly good idea to you?

The Prisoner or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair goes to a great deal of trouble to disguise the fact that it is essentially made up of a single head-shot of a man telling his story. In this regard it is almost successful. Cutaways to newsreel footage, material from Gunner Palace, and comic-book-style interstitial stills almost make you believe your'e watching a dynamic visual landscape. But the film keeps cutting back to that single talking head.

The talking head is Yunis, and his story is not a happy one; he was taken into custody by the American forces in Iraq and held for no particular reason for 9 months. Yunis delivers this information staring directly into the camera in what rarely varies from a head-and-shoulders close-up. He's fairly engaging as narrators go but is nothing particularly special, and hanging an entire movie on him is problematic. At less than an hour long, The Prisoner seems like the longest 58 minutes you'll ever spend. This thing gets old fast.

There are important things to talk about, especially when confronted with a man who was arrested for being a journalist by Saddam Hussein... and then found himself arrested again for the exact same reason by George Bush. The film never quite gets at the pulp of this paradox, preferring instead to be an extended monologue of Yunis' harrowing ordeal. Yunis asks all the right questions, but ultimately he is just one man asking them; the film feels very small.

The best moment overall comes right in the middle, when Yunis is attempting to describe his psychological torture at the hands of the Americans... and his words quite literally fail him. His command of English, apparently, isn't quite good enough to allow him to put to words his experience. There's a nice (if unintentional) metaphor there.

Given its title, the fact that Yunis only really gets around to addressing his feelings for Tony Blair in the final moments of the film is sort of weird. If you get accused of plotting to assassinate one of the pivotal figures in the "war on terror," and then those accusations mysteriously vanish but your incarceration continues, surely you'd have a bit more to say about how and why this person who you've never met has somehow become the dark star around which your entire life now unwillingly revolves? Prisoner makes no such connections, and as such stays small, and ultimately inconsequential.