Flavours of Iraq review – vivid childhood memories of 80s Baghdad from writer in Paris exile

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Powerful animation portrays experiences of a French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, with anecdotes about his father, a prominent leftist exile With a title translated a little inelegantly from Le Parfum d’Irak to “flavours of Iraq” when “the perfume of Iraq” might have been simpler and better, this film is a powerful, vivid animation co-directed by Léonard Cohen with its author, French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, robustly narrated in Alani’s first-person by the actor Malik Zidi. The animation style is stylised and expressionist: shapes and forms like silhouette cutouts suggest the piercingly insistent forms of memory. It is about Alani’s childhood and fractured family experience growing up in Paris in the 80s as the son of a prominent leftist Iraqi exile who was forced out of his native country on account of his opposition to Saddam Hussein. The story itself is told through a loose series of flashbacks occasioned by his father’s funeral, at which mourners, members of Iraq’s 1970s soc...
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American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

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George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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