BB in wonderland

It seems the wheels of the various camps of the Bhutto PR machine are whirring full tilt. The latest offering is the documentary Bhutto co-directed by Duane Baughman and Johnny O’Hara, (whose film Fields of Fuel won the 2008 Sundance Audience Award) and co-directed by Jessica Hernandez, a veteran television editor. The film turns the spotlight on Benazir Bhutto with “exclusive interviews from the Bhutto family and never-before-seen footage.”

The film begins with a heavily montaged sequence of news snippets with facts and figures flying out of the screen like a 3-D Star Wars: Pakistan! 97% Muslim, 4 Military coups since 1963! 9,824 killed by terrorism! This is ostensibly to anchor the viewer in the hotbed that is Pakistan, and begin at a fever-pitched level of excitement.

Then we are graced with about 30 minutes out of the almost two hours of the glorification of Zulifkar Ali Bhutto as the dapper-don, quipping with John F Kennedy that if he was an American he would be in his place, as the scoundrel ripping a bill in half in the Security Council of the UN saying, “Why do I need to waste my time here? I am going” and as the Renaissance man teasing his daughter about a photograph, “You look like Mussolini there. Be careful” a quote used before in Benazir Bhutto’s biography Daughter of the East.

Benazir’s early years in the 1970s at Oxford are portrayed as an idyllic, pampered time, to the soundtrack of T-Rex’s song ‘Get it On’ which is a totally inappropriate song choice and Cat Stevens ‘Wild World’ with a few talking heads such as Arianna Huffington saying things like, “She loved having fun.” Apparently, BB once sent out a party invitation in gold letters that read, “Darling! What would the party be without you?”

To go from this mood to ZAB yelling in a speech, “We will build the nuclear bomb even if we have to eat grass for 1,000 years!” is unnerving. The agenda of the directors and producers from this point on seems transparent: this documentary is not going to be gritty or raw by any means, it appears as an elitist venture for the elite of the world. It seems absurd that ZAB, a “man of the people”, turns to his daughter, indicating the poor of Pakistan, as she heads off for her privileged education and says, “It is because of their sweat that you will be educated.” It may not have been the filmmaker’s intention, but the documentary makes one consider more than ever before how a woman with a background and family such as hers could ever truly have any empathy for the “people”, the “real” people of Pakistan, to use ZAB’s quotes.

Her transformation into the political figure she became in the ‘80s is mystifying. The film assumes that its audience will understand that after all her holidaying in Switzerland and the south of France, her “mission to bring democracy” to Pakistan and her status as Bhutto heir is enough to justify her ascent to Prime Minister.  There is an essential tip that writer’s are taught, in order to affect a compelling story, “Show, don’t tell”. The documentary does more telling then showing. To be told that Benazir’s life resembles a Greek tragedy is very different from actually being shown this.

The conflict, the pain, the dilemmas that a human in a Greek tragedy would face are absent from the characterisation of Benazir in the film. Naturally, it is no easy task making a film posthumously about a person, but it is possible to create nuance and vary the tone. It must be noted, to their credit that the filmmakers do include the views of Fatima Bhutto, who has emerged in recent times as Benazir’s greatest detractor. However, all her screen time is followed directly by another individual attempting to negate her, or defend Benazir which waters down the attempt at frisson in the documentary. At one point, Sanam Bhutto says that nowhere in the press is Fatima Bhutto named as Mir Murtaza Bhutto’s daughter but always as the niece of BB. “My niece,” says Sanam, “is nothing without Benazir Bhutto.”

The tone of the film is for the most part homogenous. It seems to be aimed solely at tugging the heart-strings, with many instances of individuals weeping. All that was missing were the violins. Unfortunately, instead of creating an in-depth portrait of Benazir it makes her come across as, for the most part, disingenuous.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2010.