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The title of Mohammad Al Daradji’s ‘Ahlaam’ (2005) is translated as dreams. After an initial viewing one could be forgiven for thinking the word for nightmare would have been as appropriate. The film takes the viewer through the events that affect three protagonists; Ali (Bashir Al Majid ), Mehdi (Mohamed Hashim) and of course Ahlaam (Aseel Adel). The film opens with a mixture of flash forwards and flashbacks during which we see shots of a woman who is later revealed as Ahlaam dressing for her wedding day. The director chooses to intersperse these particular scenes with lots of over the shoulder shots and extreme close ups, but not of people’s faces, rather their animated body parts, giving these scenes an almost voyeuristic quality. After all, the bride is getting dressed and viewer is in fact peeking. These events are then juxtaposed with the real life news footage of bombs going off in Baghdad during a war. In the event that anyone was unaware of Iraq’s fate in recent years this is a swift reminder of the type of violence the city suffered.
Credits remind the viewer when we are watching scenes from the Gulf War, before the fall of Saddam and immediately after. Prior to the war, we see that Baghdad’s streets are overflowing with children. The city is therefore symbolically full of life. It has a hope for a future which these children represent. Ali, is a soldier, who is kind to children and beggars and yearns for a day when he is no longer a soldier. He is frequently told by others that “one day military service will be but a memory”. At this point one notices that he can still dream of a life outside of the army, be it looking after his mother or taking on a different career. In a different part of the city Ahlaam is being courted by Ahmed (Mortadha Saadi) a man who is deeply in love with her, much to the happiness of her family and indeed herself. Mehdi is a stressed student but one who has fun with his fellow students. In the scenes prior to Saddam’s downfall the viewer can also see that each of the three individuals faces their own everyday life stresses. Ahlaam has studies and family responsibilities; Ali had a sick mother and Mehdi has the worries of his future as a doctor.
However even before the war they all have troubles to deal with. Ali’s best friend Hassan (Kaheel Khalid) has had enough of army life and complains that “we’re not even treated like humans here” to which Ali’s hopeful response is “we can’t let them affect us”. Superior guards and soldiers are rude and aggressive to their subordinates and the depiction of army life is not a positive one. It is revealed that Hassan has spent years being given incorrect medication from the army for a condition. He understandably feels that decent treatment lies over the border, outside of Iraq. Mehdi’s dreams are dampened when a fellow student points out that he is unlikely to be accepted for the Masters degree he wishes to study as he is not a member of Saddam’s Baath’ist party and as his father was executed as a communist this is even less likely. The sudden look of sadness and concern on Mehdi’s face is almost crude but the expression is effective and this is not a film about subtleties. The point is clear: during the reign of Saddam Hussein if one wished to advance in a professional vocation then party allegiance played a huge role and your family’s politics was equally as important in deciding such matters. Ahlaam has different concerns as she is frightened by seeing people being beaten and arrested in the street, taken from their loved ones to who knows where. As the filmic countdown to the war begins we see all three become more anxious and alarmed at the events they are experiencing and witnessing.
However, things take a shocking twist when we see the city two days before the fall of Saddam. If life was bad before it is terrible now, as Ali and Ahlaam are now residents in the psychiatric hospital that Mehdi is working in. They are both severely unhinged and are not even shadows of their former selves but shadows of those if such things exist. Flashbacks reveal that Hassan was killed in a bomb attack which has left Ali traumatized. He is unable to accept the loss of his friend. We see that he attempted to carry the body of his comrade over the border to gain him medical help as if by giving Hassan what he wanted he would somehow survive his injuries. It is positively painful to watch him stumble while carrying Hassan’s body and he carries his friend from night fall to well past sunrise. He is found by soldiers who then arrest him and his incarceration in the hospital seems wrong. The viewer learns that he tried to desert the army but this is a man who is clearly not sane anymore and to punish him through a military court by severing his ear seems immoral. A sane man can acknowledge his actions but Ali is in a completely different state of consciousness. The viewer is forced to question the nature of punishing the mentally ill: if a man is mad why inflict such punishment on him?
Ahlaam is in the hospital in her wedding dress, the result of mental trauma brought on by the sudden arrest and disappearance of Ahmed. She appears to have totally lost her mental faculties. The images of her shock therapy are alarming and realistic. They are then juxtaposed with images of bombs going off. As the city is being blitzed, so too is Ahlaam. When she later wakes from the treatment (and a dream of Ahmed) she finds that the doctors and nurses (who brutally held her down during her treatment) are dead and the place is being looted as a result of an air strike. The incoherent Ali sees Mehdi hurt in a scuffle and this seems to affect him and the viewer sees him change from infantile to focused within minutes (although it is not clear how the half-naked Ali will round up the lost patients!) As he starts to find his former helpful self, he rescues an injured man from in front of an oncoming train. If the film’s setting were not so upsetting one would feel nostalgia during this scene for the black and white silent rescue films where a damsel is saved by the handsome stranger from a fate worse than death.
An interesting moment is when Ali manages to find a working light after contemplating over a broken torch that he previously found. He is no longer in the darkness of his confined cell and yet these symbols of light are meaningful to him. We can argue that torches are a visual connection for the viewer of the link between Ali and Hassan, who used to either ask for lights to be turned off or shine torches in his friend’s face. Light plays an interesting part in this film. In the scenes prior to the fall of Saddam, much of the film is shot in the dark and yet the characters had hopes and dreams in their lives. Hopes of a future at the very least (In Ahlaam’s case this involved having 500 children!) After the fall, when the looting takes place and the sun is out, they all seem lost, physically, and emotionally.
Towards the very end Ahlaam is sexually abused and this is indicative of the horrific events that can take place in a city or country internally during a time of a national crisis. During a war, human beings are capable of showing bravery, mercy and compassion…but as we are shown, they also take advantage and violate others. The crime of rape is considered inhumane in the Middle East. To show one in a city which is being blitzed implies that that the inhumanity of some is always lingering beneath the surface and unlike war films which show people working together, here we are presented with a different reality, one where an immoral man can still take advantage of a vulnerable woman. The fact that the rape scene is immediately followed by shots of the empty city is very unsettling, particularly when we go back to Ahlaam and see drops of blood being washed away in the bathroom where the crime takes place. There was no one around her, she was literally cornered and to see the rapist and his friends simply dump her unconscious body in the street like garbage, even though they previously called her ‘gold’ leaves the viewer somewhat despairing also. It all seems so relentless and cold.
Stylistically the film is brave. ‘Ahlaam’ uses many non-professional actors and at times this is noticeable, such as when Mehdi looks forlorn on hearing of his prospects. This does not cause an obvious distraction, but one cannot help observing this at several points in the film, perhaps because an audience will heavily garner information from an actor’s use of body language. Occasionally the translation of the subtitles seems rather formal and static, even a little clunky. This is particularly the case for the scenes with long greetings, but this is a minor point. One actual criticism however is that the film is a little too long. Ten minutes could easily have been edited off particularly if these had been the repeated scenes of Ali, Ahlaam and Mehdi at the time of the hospital patient’s escaping. If the reason for this was to cause a confusion in the mind of the viewer which reflected the confusion of Ahlaam as she wandered helplessly then some success has been achieved. However aside from this, the repetition does not seem to have any other narrative function and will potentially cause a different type of confusion and dare I say it, indifference in viewers who start to tire of seeing the minutes of the endless wandering.
At the end Ali finds the lost Ahlaam, only to be shot by a sniper. Just before he dies, he remembers who he is, and his final words are ‘I am Ali’. It is clear that Ali felt he needed to be redeemed but we do not necessarily agree with this or see why. Yes, he was haunted by feelings of being unable to save Hassan, but this was out of his hands. In contrast, the director chooses to have Ahlaam's rapist not suffer any consequence and yet surely he is the one who really needs to atone or be punished for what he did, a crime which in Iraq is considered by many to be deserving of execution as a punishment. The events that unfold in this film are shocking and will fill a viewer with different amount of anger, frustration, and anxiety. The city is being ravaged and so are the inhabitants. As one character points out, “It is sad. Baghdad has fallen. So, we all must fall.”
Country: Iraq
Budget: £182,449
Length: 107mins
Pub/2009
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