It takes a certain kind of documentary to make sifting through old papers look exciting, but in “Coup 53,” the director Taghi Amirani sets an expectation of suspense early on. Visiting a national-security archive at George Washington University, the filmmaker, who also serves as an on-camera M.C., looks at an ordinary file cabinet and sees “documents that essentially changed the fate of my country.”
Born in Iran and educated in Britain, Amirani, who has worked mainly in television, took about a decade to make “Coup 53,” and that obsessive quality is palpable in the film. His goal: to shine new light on British involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, then the prime minister of Iran. (The film’s release date, Aug. 19, is the anniversary of the overthrow.)
Skillfully interweaving Amirani’s own hunt for information with a detailed account of the steps leading to Mossadegh’s ouster, the film does a remarkable of job of matching archival footage from a wide array of sources and years. Across time and space, a single, consistent story emerges. For a narrative shrouded in subterfuge, that’s a considerable achievement.
That Britain, whose oil interests were thrown into question by Mossadegh’s push to nationalize the industry, had involvement in the coup hardly qualifies as a secret. And the United States’s participation has been acknowledged to varying degrees: In 2000, James Risen of The New York Times reported on the C.I.A.’s secret history of the coup.
The ostensible big find in “Coup 53” is a transcript of an interview that Norman Darbyshire, a British intelligence officer whose role in the coup has been noted before (in Risen’s account, among other places), gave for a British TV series called “End of Empire,” which was broadcast in 1985. The transcript, which was posted online this week by the George Washington University archive, is filled with details on the events in Iran, although Amirani casts doubt on at least one of Darbyshire’s assertions.
It’s possible that Amirani overstates the transcript’s significance as a bombshell. He interviews a journalist, Nigel Hawkes, who had reported on the document’s contents in 1985. And when Amirani meets with Stephen Dorril, the author of a book on the British intelligence service MI6, he learns that Dorril has an identical copy.
Still, the transcript poses new mysteries. Darbyshire’s interview wasn’t featured in the version of “End of Empire” that aired. Was he filmed, or merely recorded as audio? (A researcher for the series isn’t sure the interview was shot, but a cameraman remembers otherwise.) Amirani and his editor, the Hollywood veteran Walter Murch, comb through outtakes from the program and find no footage of Darbyshire. Was he ever in the program, or removed from it? If so, by whom and why? And while Amirani extracts all manner of eyebrow-raising discussions from “End of Empire,” he resorts to filming Darbyshire’s words in re-enactments, with Ralph Fiennes as Darbyshire.
Some of Amirani’s formal strategies can be irritating. When he goes to visit Hedayat Matine-Daftary, Mossadegh’s grandson, he appears to have set up shots in hallways to show himself entering and exiting. That sort of visible planning calls into question the spontaneity of the reactions and interactions we see.
But the counterargument is that “Coup 53” captures a filmmaker showing his work. The scenes of Amirani lining up a cut-up document with an intact copy, or of him and Murch mapping out their materials, contribute to a sense of a movie that is continually interrogating itself. Is “Coup 53” trustworthy in every respect? Perhaps not. Both as a detective story and as a deep dive into a world event whose consequences linger, it is bracing, absorbing filmmaking.
Coup 53
Not rated. In English, Persian, French and Italian with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. Watch through virtual cinemas.
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August 19, 2020 at 06:00PM
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‘Coup 53’ Review: International Underhandedness, Still Mysterious - The New York Times
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