The Matchmaker – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

The Match­mak­er – first-look review

08 Sep 2022

Words by Anahit Behrooz

A woman wearing a white hijab and looking directly at the camera.
A woman wearing a white hijab and looking directly at the camera.
Benedet­ta Argen­ter­i’s doc­u­men­tary about Too­ba Gondal fails to get to the sys­tem­at­ic caus­es of rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion, instead opt­ing for shod­dy per­son­al blame.

The West, sim­ply put, does not know what to do with Mus­lim women. Are they vic­tims in des­per­ate need of a white sav­iour or will­ing par­tic­i­pants in their own oppres­sion? Do they need a fem­i­nist re-edu­ca­tion or is their life under patri­archy sim­ply a cul­tur­al quirk? Do they even have agency, and if so, why don’t they use it to escape their obvi­ous­ly intol­er­a­ble cir­cum­stances? And what is with the veil? Why do they keep putting it on?

The Match­mak­er, Benedet­ta Argenteri’s severe and histri­on­ic doc­u­men­tary about the West­ern women who defect­ed to ISIS (sub­ver­sive­ly called Da’esh in the Arab-speak­ing world), is – in the vein of so much media about Mus­lim women – sim­i­lar­ly confused.

Tak­ing as its sub­ject Too­ba Gondal, who fled the UK to Syr­ia in 2014 and alleged­ly recruit­ed a dozen West­ern women to mar­ry Da’esh fight­ers, The Match­mak­er is a por­trait of – in the­o­ry – a shad­owy and cul­tur­al­ly abject fig­ure, whose sto­ry speaks to immense­ly urgent socio-polit­i­cal ques­tions regard­ing the pro­lif­er­a­tion of Da’esh, the gen­dered vio­lence of war­fare, and the slow creep of rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion on the Inter­net. The real­i­ty, how­ev­er, is a mud­dled and dis­turbing­ly par­ti­san snap­shot of a woman that, in its haste to carve out a nar­ra­tive of agency, absolves the struc­tures that cre­at­ed her of any responsibility.

It is the role of doc­u­men­tar­i­ans to bring their unique argu­ment to a sto­ry, to retell the world accord­ing to their own focus, but this is film­mak­ing that is awash with agen­da. Large­ly com­prised of inter­views Argen­teri con­duct­ed with Gondal in a refugee camp after Gondal renounced Da’esh, The Matchmaker’s nat­u­ral­is­tic, con­ver­sa­tion­al footage is inter­cut with clipped head­lines from the Tele­graph, The Sun and – wait for it – The Dai­ly Mail, whose dire male­dic­tions about the gun-tot­ing jiha­di” are super­seded only by a swelling score that cre­ates a frankly par­o­d­ic sense of foreboding.

The very fact of the inter­views is inter­est­ing, but Argenteri’s ques­tions are mawk­ish and ori­en­tal­is­ing, and Gondal her­self reads as dis­arm­ing­ly young, filled with the kind of embar­rass­ment for her pre­vi­ous life that is nor­mal­ly reserved for awk­ward prom night flash­backs. Not much is made of the ambi­gu­i­ties and con­tra­dic­tions of her behav­iour or her rela­tion­ship with the truth, except for an over­ar­ch­ing air of supe­ri­or misgiving.

Argen­teri is clear­ly intent on sub­vert­ing the nar­ra­tives of vic­tim­hood that she feels are all too eas­i­ly assigned to such women, yet the pen­du­lum has swung too far, strik­ing instead a note of soli­tary blame. The Iraq War is, shock­ing­ly, nev­er men­tioned, and nor are the oth­er geopo­lit­i­cal con­di­tions cre­at­ed by the West that led direct­ly to the rise of Da’esh and the hos­tile envi­ron­ment of Islam­o­pho­bia that was ripe for rad­i­cal­i­sa­tion. I would call it manipulated…brainwashed,” Gondal responds at one point to Argenteri’s ques­tion of her switch” to a jiha­di mind­set, and it is not a lit­tle hor­ri­fy­ing that the inter­view sub­ject is the first to intro­duce this thread, that it is bare­ly fol­lowed up, and that no con­sid­er­a­tion is giv­en as to why a sur­veil­lance state dense with Orwellian pro­grammes such as Pre­vent and See It Say It Sort It did absolute­ly noth­ing to pre­vent any­thing at all.

We know there are much larg­er issues of respon­si­bil­i­ty and com­plic­i­ty at stake here – the recent rev­e­la­tions about Shami­ma Begum have made that vio­lent­ly clear. Yet this doc­u­men­tary does very lit­tle to uncov­er the real machi­na­tions of pow­er at play. Instead, it mere­ly gawks, and prods, and indicts.

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