The Hamburg Cell

moomoo · Aug 30, 2004

Heard about this film on NPR this morning on the way to work.

Any UK Rockets fans out there planning on catching it this Thursday?

IMDB entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398093/

Sunday Herald Article: http://www.sundayherald.com/44320

Hard Cell

TV: Hamburg Cell (Thursday, Channel 4, 9pm)
Friday Night With Jonathan Ross (Friday, BBC1, 10.35pm)
Parkinson (Saturday, Scottish, 10pm)
By Damien Love

Here’s New York City, bright in the sharp September sun. What’s wrong with this picture? Watching the opening of Hamburg Cell – conscious, as everyone who watches will be, of the subject matter – it still took a long second for me to realise the creeping discomfort I was experiencing was due to the fact that, there on the horizon, the Twin Towers stood again – and that, for a long second, I had barely noticed.
How they got it back – whether digital manipulation or stock footage – I’m not sure. But if for no other reason, the director, Antonia Bird, deserves credit for being able somehow to present an image of the World Trade Centre, its towering 11, in a way that doesn’t instantly assault you with the force of an icon. For a moment, it’s like seeing the building the way you used to see it in the background of television shows, its massive ordinariness. So “there”, you hardly see it at all.

Although it deals in thoughts and actions most of us could live our lives without contemplating, ordinariness becomes a key element in Hamburg Cell. T he drama attempts to consider the September 11 attacks from the viewpoint of those who carried them out. Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian architecture student who piloted the first plane into the towers, and whose stern image became imprinted on the world’s consciousness, is a major character. However, the main protagonist here is Ziad Jarrah, chief hijacker of United Airlines Flight 93, the plane that came down in a Pennsylvania field, before it could reach its Washington target.

Beginning that Tuesday morning, as the hijackers prepare to board, the film then flips back five years, to consider why these disparate souls – who came into contact in that drab German university town – were drawn together in a warped, radical form of Islam; and why they then reached the militant, deathly place whereby they could commit the 3000 murders that set the pace for the 21st century.

Why make this film at all? It’s a question you feel the film-makers struggling to answer for themselves. In terms of both style and content, Hamburg Cell’s even-handedness has already been noted, but “even-handedness” doesn’t sum up the serious care and balance about this undertaking . The closest metaphor is scientists handling some explosive or toxin, separated from their material by a thick wall of re inforced glass.

Scripted by Ronan Bennett, drawing on two years of research by co-writer Alice Perman, the film is based on details gleaned from interviews with the hijackers’ family and friends, court transcripts, government files and private correspondence. What we see is speculation, but within a rigid framework of fact. Bird, meanwhile, has hammered her style flat, until the film moves with a clean, fast, grey economy. There’s so little fat or flash that the elements that do seem excessive or extraneous glare all the more drastically; I can’t remember a TV drama where the use of music, not simply the specific drumbeats and thrillerish shivers employed here, but the very concept of using music, seemed so thoroughly wrong.

In the latter stages, as the final acts of the plan unfold, pieces of text flash onscreen, snipped from contemporaneous reports from government agencies about al-Qaeda suspects abroad in the US, but these, too, seem grafted in from another film , a documentary on intelligence failures. Such matters are not the point here, and, although it presents a vision of how faith can become politicised and corrupted, faith and politics are not the point either; that story could perhaps only be filmed by Muslim film-makers, and that might have been a truly explosive film. Even drama itself seems beside the point; purely as drama, the film – with its evenness and the paradoxical confusion inherent in sticking by the facts – fails.

Why make it, then? The answer is more simple, and far more difficult: to force us to consider the concept that these men who did this thing were human. The other stuff comes later, after we get past that, and that’s where the ordinariness comes in.

When we meet Atta here, he seems already unknowable, dreaming of the life waiting in some other, paradisal universe, ready to wash this world off of him, with fire. So Jarrah – to secular, Western eyes, an infinitely more sympathetic figure – becomes the focus. As we follow him through recognisable moments, we build a picture of someone who could be lonely and bright and charming, who could laugh, love and make love, have a girlfriend, a family who cared. Some stranger you could get talking to if your flight was delayed. Someone who may have been conflicted about the slaughter he was engaged in.

In this respect, the film succeeds (Karim Saleh as Jarrah and Kamel – who plays Atta and also undergoes his own, brief, version of conflict – are both extraordinarily good). Maybe that’s why it leaves you flat, even as it replays the planes hitting towers again. So, OK. They were human. So what now?

Meanwhile, back in the unreal world, we are being encouraged to buy The Chat Show War, as Friday Night With Jonathan Ross returns in advance of the first Parkinson broadcast for ITV on Saturday . If you’ve been living in a bunker, you might not know that Ross has Paul Newman on his first programme, while, in a Colour Of Money-style showdown, Parkinson is retaliating with top gun, Tom Cruise.

God knows, we need a decent chat show, and maybe manufactured rivalry will have some positive effect. I can’t see Ross ever becoming the nation’s chatter of choice, though. Magicians use the term “shut-eye” to describe a conjuror who has started believing in his own magic, and, on TV at least, Ross seems to have reached that stage. In the 1980s, he started out knowingly affecting the ironic half-character of chat-show host as a vain and cheesy creature, simultaneously sycophantic and yet so miscalculatingly over-chummy it verged on offensiveness. But now it seems the dummy he created has taken him over, like Michael Redgrave in Dead Of Night. When he’s interviewing someone, his questions don’t seem to matter so much as the fact it’s him who’s asking them. Paul Newman will still be Paul Newman.

Parky, meanwhile, seems grumpily concerned he has something to prove about not having lost his bite – a notion I hope he forgets . True, his last few series were a blur of PR bubblewrap, the only memorable moment the prickly silence that fell around Meg Ryan. That was interesting to see, but it shouldn’t set the tone for the new series.

The other thing about those recent Parkinsons is that they had few guests worth the bother, and those who were were given, or gave, hardly any time (Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, crammed into the final minutes). Thinking back to the shows from Parkinson’s golden era we remember most – Jimmy Cagney, Orson Welles, Robert Mitchum, Jimmy Stewart, even Muhammad Ali and the perennial Billy Connolly, who, in a symbolic gesture, guests alongside Cruise on Saturday – it’s not aggressive, digging doggedness by the interviewer we remember. It’s the guests . It was never that Parkinson was biting, or giving an easy ride, more that he was giving guests the space and structure in which to reveal themselves. He always knew when to press though, and maybe back then more celebrities still had enough awareness of reality to know how to deal with that. Maybe that’s the problem. Parky is still the same size. It’s just the stars got small.

Hamburg Cell screens at the Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh, at 1pm today, as part of the Film Festival’s Best Of The Fest programme

29 August 2004
Click to expand...

across110thstreet · Aug 30, 2004

this looks intense, i'll keep my eye out for it

Cohen · Aug 30, 2004

I wouldn't mind seeing it in Edinburgh.

Forums

The Hamburg Cell

moomoo Member

across110thstreet Member

Cohen Member

Share This Page

About ClutchFans

Rockets Content

Support ClutchFans!