BACKSTABBING FOR BEGINNERS (2018)

Excellent, if barely released film from Danish writer/director Per Fly.  A true story of espionage, violence, diplomacy & love in the run-up to the Iraqi War.  United Nations centered, and more Graham Greene than John Le Carré with Fly refusing to overload for shock or suspense the way most Iraqi projects do.*  The story largely behind the scenes where the action lies in diplomatic maneuvers.  The coming conflict not about land or Sunni/Shiite belief, not even government control, but about dollars.  Oodles of it from various oil supplies and oil suppliers, here stemming from a reasonably corrupt U.N. project that trades a cut of oil revenues for food.  But first, an obscene amount siphoned off before distribution, 30 to 60 percent taken in the form of bribes or ‘honorariums’ before what's left filters down to the ’needy.’  Ben Kingsley, in towering form, runs the program, a master player whose naïf assistant (an almost distractingly handsome Theo James) is raised to second in the initiative after the suspicious death of his immediate superior.  James, an idealistic type whose father died in a Mid-East terrorist bombing, is learning on the job as Kingsley consistently compromises principle (and percentage) to get what he can networking thru a seemingly incomprehensible system of bribery.  But James soon finds himself playing the game himself, working just the sort of balancing act he’d hoped to quickly faze out.  All further complicated by a U.N. official trying to kill the Oil for Food program (Jacqueline Bisset, excellent, and her face surgically untouched - hurrah!), and by Belçim Bilgin’s beautiful Kurdish activist who may simply be using James for her own political purposes.  With relationship and loyalties in constant flux, it’s the most unsentimental education in global power politics imaginable.  Yet easy to follow and fashioned without special pleading or cheap exploitation.  Business as usual in a faraway war being leveraged for personal gain.  Each setback a new opportunity.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Try THE QUIET AMERICAN/’02, where Greene used Vietnam as his petri dish in war and morality.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-quiet-american-1958-2002.html