GENERAL IDI AMIN DADA Movie Review

“Do you see?,” points out General Idi Amin to director Barbet Schroeder as they take a boat ride together through a Ugandan jungle, “the elephants on the shore are saluting me.” If Werner Herzog can be called a risk-taker to film a documentary on the edge of the La Soufrière volcano at the moment it was predicted it would erupt, what would you call Schroeder for putting himself in a small boat, deep in the Ugandan countryside, with only a cinematographer (Nestor Almendros) and Idi Amin for company? It would not be inappropriate to sit through the entire 90 minutes of Schroeder's documentary General Idi Amin Dada in disbelief, but it would also not be odd to wonder at its conclusion just what exactly you've been looking at. Amin clearly enjoys playing to the camera, and the focus of the film quickly boils down not to whether Almendros and Schroeder will come to harm (Hollywood success followed for both), but rather the old con artist's “who'll blink-first-since-l-know-that-you-know-that-l-know” routine; Amin orchestrates it with the skill of Joe Mantegna in Mamet's House of Games. In the end, the film doesn't provide a whole lot of information that wasn't already known in 1974; as an exercise in macho bravado, however, it does give Schroeder boasting rights. (Herzog's volcano didn't erupt either, at least not until he left the mountain.)

NEXT STOP … The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, God's Angry Man and La Soufrière (two short films by Werner Herzog)

1975 113m/C D: Barbet Schroeder; W: Barbet Schroeder; C: Nestor Almendros. VHS WAR, BTV, FCT