CIT­I­ZEN­FOUR

You could imag­ine Lau­ra Poitras’ extra­or­di­nary CIT­I­ZEN­FOUR mak­ing a great and very claus­tro­pho­bic one-act play. Despite its cen­tral, pot-boil­er dra­ma tak­ing place almost entire­ly in a cramped Hong Kong hotel suite, you’re con­stant­ly made to feel the pres­ence of insid­i­ous and unseen out­side forces who are, to para­phrase the film’s ​“hero”, Edward Snow­den, con­stant­ly on the verge of kick­ing down the door.

At one point, while Snow­den is prim­ing Guardian jour­nal­ist Glenn Greenwald’s lap­top for clan­des­tine comms, an unan­nounced fire alarm test occurs in the hall­way — a moment of high ten­sion that is imme­di­ate­ly read as the game being rum­bled before it has start­ed. And in the spir­it of its sub­ject, CIT­I­ZEN­FOUR (Snowden’s code­name) feels every bit a film that’s been made via cloak and dag­ger meth­ods and then smug­gled behind ene­my lines to our cin­e­ma screens.

It’s a sim­ple filmed chron­i­cle of how Poitras and the polit­i­cal­ly-mind­ed Green­wald came into con­tact with a covert whistle­blow­er who offered them (via a series of encrypt­ed emails) the chance to land the scoop of the cen­tu­ry. Those who have fol­lowed the drip-feed of rev­e­la­tions to come from Snowden’s need-to-know pay­load will be aware of the basic struc­ture of the sto­ry and will pos­si­bly even have decid­ed whose side they’re on. Yet in focus­ing entire­ly on the process of whistle­blow­ing – the banal­i­ty of the act – Poitras has pro­duced a work that is at once polit­i­cal­ly empow­er­ing and an encap­su­la­tion his­to­ry unfold­ing on camera.

The cen­tral rev­e­la­tion here is that we’re giv­en the first detailed char­ac­ter pro­file of Snow­den as a per­son, at one time a punch-clock cor­po­rate stooge who was sec­ond­ed by the NSA and hand­ed the high­est secu­ri­ty clear­ance pos­si­ble to be able to devel­op sophis­ti­cat­ed new spy soft­ware, and now a bespec­ta­cled emblem of lib­er­ty who appears to be very com­fort­able with sac­ri­fic­ing his own life and pri­va­cy so the pub­lic might be able to retain some pal­try sem­blance of theirs. It’s fore­most an extreme­ly sad sto­ry, less due to what gov­ern­ments have been furtive­ly sanc­tion­ing in the name of nation­al secu­ri­ty, and more that their machi­na­tions have reached a dan­ger point where some­one felt the need to step up onto a fiery podi­um and say enough is enough.

This is a film which upturns Le Car­ré-style clas­si­cal con­cep­tions of fud­dy-dud­dy polit­i­cal activism and affirms that the new face of the enlight­ened left is under 30, prodi­gious­ly clever, hyper artic­u­late and is in pos­ses­sion of an acute under­stand­ing of The Ene­my and their tac­tics. Yet, with much mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy pro­duced with bugs and micro­phones ready-imple­ment­ed into the design (part of an unfath­omable and far-reach­ing cor­po­rate con­spir­a­cy, we’re told), shady meet­ings in under­ground carparks to trade brief­cas­es remains the safest form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In essence, CITZEN­FOUR also acts as a guide for exist­ing in a world where human beings are guilty until proven inno­cent and are essen­tial­ly walk­ing sources of meta­da­ta that can be hand­ed, part and par­cel, to cor­po­rate inter­ests. The bril­liant coda presents the joys of pre-dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion while also offer­ing a mock­ing satir­i­cal dia­logue with any­one who might hap­pen to be lis­ten­ing in.

By design, the film doesn’t quite have the sta­mi­na for a long race, and after Snow­den has been spir­it­ed away from Hong Kong and forced to spend 40 nights in the diplo­mat­ic pur­ga­to­ry of the arrivals lounge of Moscow Air­port, we lose that sense of on-the-lam imme­di­a­cy. There are still twists and turns, but per­son­al safe­ty means that they can’t be depict­ed on cam­era, and so there are some more gen­er­al dis­cus­sions about the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of what the gov­ern­ment are doing.

Despite all that, per­haps the film’s great­est coup is in fram­ing Barack Oba­ma as a leader with even greater moral turpi­tude than George Bush Jr, a stag­ger­ing and depress­ing feat in itself. Plus, the film’s very exis­tence stands as tes­ta­ment to the fact that while we maybe cow­er­ing under the cor­po­rate jack­boot, we still have the pow­er of expres­sion, and that’s all we need to get the resis­tance mov­ing. They may have the seman­tic dou­ble­s­peak down pat, but we have the pow­er, knowl­edge and tenac­i­ty to beat them at their own game.