Coup 53
I’m not a history buff. So documentaries about historical topics are compelling to me, especially when it comes to sea changes in history. “Coup 53” is about the overthrow of the democratically-elected leader of Iraq, Prime Minister Mossadegh, and the installation of the military Shah by the CIA and MI-6 in 1953. I’ve never really known about MI-6’s involvement in the coup; in fact, that is because the British government has never taken credit for it. Learning the British side of things is what Taghi Amirani’s film is all about, and it’s a riveting piece of investigative journalism and cinema.
Amirani’s decision to look into the coup is a personal one. A native Iranian, sent to study in Britain as a teenager, he looks at the process of studying the coup, and Britain’s role in it, as a way of reconciling the two homes he’s had in his life. Working with the legendary editor Walter Murch, Amirani conducts new interviews while going back through personal archives, and recorded archives (some never-before-seen) to create a film that brings full context to the event to people who have not studied it over the years, including some of the reasons the Americans and Brits would consider removing someone who is democratically-elected. Given the time frame, you may be able to guess some of the reasons; still, some might take you by surprise, and that’s part of what makes this such a fascinating movie to watch.
A lot of Amirani’s research leads him to a British documentary series from the 1980s, “Fall of Empire,” about how the British Empire came undone. The series transcripts show an interview with a former MI-6 agent by the name of Norman Darbyshire, but that section has large chunks missing, and, oddly enough, no footage of his interview found. When he finds another version of the transcript intact, Darbyshire’s words in their full context leads to remarkable revelations about the coup- he was one of the architects of it on the British side. Shouldn’t there be filmed footage of his interview, though, even if it wasn’t put in? The researcher on the series is asked, and isn’t sure, and the archived footage in the BFI vaults show no footage of a Darbyshire interview. Apparently, he did not want to be filmed, but the audio of his interview is missing as well. And so, Amirani is left to try and re-enact that interview, and he could not have brought in a better person to do so than Ralph Fiennes. Based on what we hear of Darbyshire from Amirani’s research and interviews about the man, Fiennes’s reading gives us a spot-on interpretation of the words of a man who is arrogant, proud of what he did, and annoyed that the US had been given full credit for the coup all of these years. It’s an important piece of the puzzle as Amirani spends the second half of the film retracing the events before, during, and after the coup.
Having Murch as an editor means you are going to get a magnificently-streamlined narrative, even if it is filled with twists and complexity and layers upon layers of storytelling; think of his reconstruction of “Touch of Evil” from Orson Welles’s memo, or the dense thematic and visual storytelling of “The Godfather” movies or “Apocalypse Now” or “The English Patient.” Here, he is the person to help Amirani bring all of the political complexity, and various vantage points Amirani has managed to gather together- including Iranian ones from a personal interview archive of staggering enormity- into an easy-to-follow narrative of how two world powers felt threatened by a country’s move towards freedom, and decided to take matters into their own hands. It wouldn’t be the last time either one did so; imagine if we hadn’t. Maybe the Middle East would have been a better place.
