Bitter Lake is an ambitious documentary that begins with some promise. But I soon lost patience with it and after 40 minutes I stopped watching it. The ambition consists in the breadth of the perspective it adopts so as to illuminate how the mess that is contemporary Afghanistan, and in particular contemporary Helmand province, came to be. It locates the roots of this mess in deals at the end of WW2 that Roosevelt entered into innocently enough--perhaps naively even--with the monarchs of Afghanistan (modernisation via energy and irrigation from US built dams) and Saudi Arabia (modernisation by dollars exchanged for oil). Unsurprisingly, both monarchs were also playing local power politics that Roosevelt probably knew or cared nothing about: the former aiming to consolidate the control of his family and more generally that of his fellow Pashtuns at the expense of Afghanistan's other ethnicities, the latter to consolidate the control of his own family at the expense of radical Wahabists who were opposed to a modernisation that threatened to dilute, curtail or corrupt Wahabism. The intrinsic interest of such information is enhanced by fascinating original footage. Unfortunately Curtis ruins it all by eschewing the linear narrative that is essential to a clear presentation of such complex material so as to indulge in frequent cross-cutting without rhyme or reason back and forth in time and space; moreover, instead of weeding out images irrelevant to his narrative he revels in them. This technique works well for thrillers or for director-centred explorations of the auteur's mind. But when it is adopted in a documentary it just creates noise. What a pity!
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