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Taghi Amirani’s documentary is an obsessively detailed dive into the expulsion in 1953 of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
By Ben Kenigsberg
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It takes a safe documentary type to make the selection of old roles exciting, but in “Coup 53”, director Taghi Amirani sets an expectation of suspense from the beginning. While visiting the national security archives at George Washington University, the filmmaker, who also serves as M.C. on camera, look at a folder and see “documents that have necessarily replaced the fate of my country.”
Born in Iran and a connoisseur of Britain, Amirani, who basically worked in television, took about a decade to make “Coup 53,” and this obsessive quality is palpable in the film. His goal: to throw out a new attitude about British participation in the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, then Iran’s prime minister. (The film’s release date, August 19, is the anniversary of the reversal).
By skillfully combining Amirani’s own data search with a detailed account of the steps that led to Mossadegh’s expulsion, the film does the task of combining archival photographs of a wide variety of resources and years. Through time and space, a coherent story of singles emerges. For a narrative shrouded in subterfuge, this is an abundant achievement.
The fact that Britain, whose oil interests were challenged by Mossadegh’s preference to nationalize the industry, involved in the coup, can hardly be considered a secret. And America’s involvement has been identified to varying degrees: in 2000, James Risen of the New York Times reported on the secret history of the coup through the C.I.A.
The wonderful discovery supposedly in “Strike 53” is a transcription of an interview that Norman Darthroughshire, a British intelligence officer whose role in the coup was already mentioned (in Risen’s account, among others), gave for a British television series called “End of Empire”, which aired in 1985. The transcript, which was published this week through the archives of George Washington University, is full of main points of occasion in Iran, Amirani casts doubt on at least one of Darthroughshire’s claims.
It is imaginable that Amirani exaggerates the meaning of the transcription as a bomb. He interviewed a journalist, Nigel Hawkes, who had reported on the contents of the document in 1985. And when Amirani meets Stephen Dorril, the author of an e-book on the British intelligence service MI6, he discovers that Dorril has the same copy.
However, the transcript raises new mysteries. Darthroughshire’s interview does not appear in the “End of Empire” broadcast. Was it filmed or just recorded as audio? (A researcher in the series is rarely very sure if the interview was filmed, but a cameraman remembers otherwise.) Amirani and his editor, Hollywood veteran Walter Murch, examine excerpts from the show and find no Darthroughshire series. Have you ever participated or been undone from the program? If so, through whom and why? And while Amirani draws all sorts of mind-blowing discussions from ‘End of Empire,’ he rewrites to film Darthroughshire’s lyrics in re-enactments, starring Ralph Fiennes as Darthroughshire.
Some of Amirani’s official methods can be irritating. When he goes to Hedayat Matine-Daftary, Mossadegh’s grandson, it turns out that he has put position plans in the aisles to display himself inside and outside. This type of visual planning calls into question the spontaneity of the reactions and interactions we observe.
But the counterargument is that “Coup 53” captures a filmmaker appearing his work. Amirani’s scenes by aligning a cut document with an intact copy, or of him and Murch mapping their materials, make a contribution to the printing of a film that continually questions itself. Is “Coup 53” trustworthy in every aspect? Maybe not. Both as a black novel and a deep dive into a global occasion whose consequences persist, it is stimulating and absorbing.
Hit 53 Unscored. In English, Persian, French and Italian with subtitles. Duration: 2 hours. Watch virtual cinemas.
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