Product: One Day in September [VHS] (2006)
Rating: 1.0
Stupid and meretricious
Kevin Macdonald wrote an intelligent and tender biography of his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger, one of the finest and most under-rated filmmakers of all time. It's therefore something of a mystery to me how he could have made such a stupid film.Macdonald spoke of his intention to make a "documentary thriller". This film about the 1972 Olympics hostage crisis certainly fulfils my idea of what thrillers are like, namely flashy, two-dimensional, morally childish and intellectually thin. It has clearly identifiable heroes (the Israeli hostages and their families), villains (the Palestinian terrorists) and comic relief (the German government and police). It has lots of flashy fast cutting, sumptuous slo-mo shots of leaping athletic bodies and a pounding rock soundtrack.Unfortunately that's not enough. Macdonald focuses completely on the events themselves, padding out the film with reels of TV news footage, which is pretty useless as the newscasters frequently had no idea what was going on. (Then again, one rescue attempt was abandoned when it turned out, ludicrously, that the Palestinians could watch a police rescue squad move into position, because it was being broadcast live on the TVs in their room.) He also focuses on only one hostage, the fencing coach Andre Spitzer, as if telling us about all the rest would spread our sympathy too thin. This makes Spitzer - who seems to have been a perfectly ordinary, friendly, intelligent man - into the saint he never would have wanted to be. (Not because of Spitzer's family but because of Macdonald's use of crackly home movies for Instant Nostalgia.)So many questions crop up which the film fails to tackle. What was the Palestinian cause? I know what it is, but no thanks to this film. Why exactly did the terrorists go on this mission? We are never told. They are depicted mainly as shadowy, almost nameless, with no history apart from a criminally brief bit of anecdote from the one surviving Palestinian. They might as well have been burglars for all we are told.We are left in no doubt that the Germans made every possible mistake in the way they handled the situation - they didn't have a properly trained anti-terrorist squad, they failed to coordinate their rescue attempt on every level, the rescue squad on the plane even abandoned the mission seconds after the helicopters with the hostages had landed on the airstrip. But why was this so? Why were they so disorganised?If you're going to make a film about political terrorism you should be explaining things a bit, not just telling a wham-bang story with a weepy ending. This film trivialises everybody involved - from the Germans who made a mess of it, through the Palestinians who committed murder for reasons we are never told, to the innocent Israelis who died. It's rubbish. I sat through it to the end, grinding my teeth. I'm just glad that intelligent documentaries are still being made; I hope nobody else follows Macdonald's lead, or non-fiction films will start to get as stupid as blockbusters.