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Released by: Drafthouse Films
Released on: October 23, 2013.
Director: Mads Brí¼gger
Cast: Mads Brí¼gger
Year: 2011
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The Movie:
Danish filmmaker and comedian Mads Brí¼gger followed up his visit to North Korea (documented in the award winning Red Chapel) with 2011's The Ambassador, a film in which he ups the ante and heads into the Central African Republic. About as remote as a country can get, the CAR is surrounded by turmoil, war and political instability and it remains a country still dealing with the after effects of years of imperialism at the hands of their one time European overlords. In short, it's not a very happy place.
So why go there? Brí¼gger gets all the paperwork in place to pose as a diplomat and sets out to shine some light on the way things work in the CAR. Corruption is evidently a huge problem and a detriment to the country healing from its many wounds and he sets out to expose this. Posing as an ambassador, he makes the connections necessary to start putting into place a plan to smuggle 'conflict diamonds' out of the country to be sold at a massive profit, and part of that profit in turn trickles down to the suppliers who reinvest the money in war efforts and political uprising (hence the term 'conflict diamonds'). Though many western nations frown upon the importation and sale of conflict diamonds, they're able to be laundered the same way dirty money is.
As Brí¼gger sets about his business - purporting to those that matter that he intends to build a match factory in the country - he's really buying his way into a diplomatic position and everything that then happens to him feels like something out of a bad movie. The fact of the matter is, though, that this is a documentary and that what we're seeing actually happened. Like any documentary it stands to reason that there were some judicious editing decisions made during post production but the point remains that you just can't make this stuff up. As he goes about setting up and meeting with different European contacts involved in the smuggling and laundering of the valuable gems, hidden cameras record conversations that are conspiracy theorists' dreams come true. All the while Brí¼gger needs to protect the truth about his identity, which adds an interesting layer of suspense. Some of the contacts he make may or may not be on to him and they make up increasingly unlikely stories as to why they won't deal with him on certain occasions. This lends credibility to Brí¼gger's persona; the movie would just be a movie if he were able to walk right in and get everything he wanted handed over to him too easily.
As the movie plays out, officials are bribed, lies are told, scams are exposed and people are constantly lied to. Eventually he gets what he needs and is able to convince the operator of a diamond mine to do business with him. The man looks like something out of a bad seventies drive-in movie, the kind of film that Cirio H. Santiago might have made for Roger Corman. And yet even this aspect, which should be the final piece of Brí¼gger's puzzle, is mired in ridiculous amounts of corruption.
It's all very telling, simultaneously hilarious and depressing. Brí¼gger eventually gets in so deep that he himself seems as unsure as to what is really going on as the viewer does. It makes for pretty riveting viewing and fairly revealing (and scathing) social commentary.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Understandably the 1.78.1 widescreen AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer on this movie is uneven and picture quality almost has to change things up a bit depending on what sort of camera is being used under what sort of conditions. So we get shots that do a great job of showing off some lovely African scenery and then we get shots that were captured on the sly using consumer grade cameras and then yet more shots captured with hidden cameras. So it makes perfect sense that there would be visual inconsistencies. As tricky as the source material might be in that regard, however, the disc is well authored in that there are no problems with compression artifacts or related issues, but occasionally a few shots look a bit on the noisy side. Overall though, this is perfectly watchable and occasionally impressive looking.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track does the job here well enough. Yeah, a lossless option is always nice but when you take into account how this movie was made and how it uses live sound without any real post production tweaking or tinkering, you can't get too worked up about it. Dialogue is sometimes muffled and people talk over one another constantly - just like real life. English subtitles help a lot and translate the different languages spoken throughout the movie. There's a score here but it's not used constantly - when it is though, it sounds just fine. This isn't really the type of movie you go into expecting reference quality audio.
The main extra on the disc is a commentary with Mads Brí¼gger himself. As this was basically his project from the ground up it's understandable that he's got a lot to say about the making of this movie and this track makes for an interesting listen. Though there are gaps of silence here and here he tells some interesting stories about his experiences making this movie, about his journeys through Africa and about how and why shooting certain scenes were far more frightening than others. This is a great compliment to the feature and it sheds a lot of light on what exactly Brí¼gger was hoping to do here, and in his own words explains where he succeeded and did not.
Aside from that, we get a trailer for the feature, trailers for a few other Drafthouse Films releases, menus and chapter stops. Inside the keepcase is a booklet of liner notes, photographs and film credits.
The Final Word:
A movie that in many ways seems larger than life, The Ambassador proves once again that truth really is stranger than fiction. This is a ballsy movie, a picture that took some serious guts to make but which is also as entertaining and strangely amusing as it is eye opening and occasionally frightening. Drafthouse Films have done a fine job on the Blu-ray release and anyone with even a passing interest in documentary movies or world politics should make sure they're able to see it.
