Let­ters from Baghdad

Let­ters from Bagh­dad is released at an inter­est­ing time. The #girl­boss thirst for pio­neer­ing women’s sto­ries is about as strong as our fatigue towards ill-fat­ed tales of west­ern med­dling in Mid­dle-East­ern pol­i­tics. This doc­u­men­tary tells the sto­ry of both. It fol­lows Gertrude Bell, the Eng­lish explor­er and writer, who at the turn of the 19^th cen­tu­ry mapped the Mid­dle-East and had a hand in the cre­ation of mod­ern-day Iraq.

Bell’s sto­ry is undoubt­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Born into a wealthy fam­i­ly and grad­u­at­ing from Oxford, she wor­ries her par­ents with her wil­ful behav­iour in the face of Vic­to­ri­an England’s sex­ist social mores. They send her to Per­sia in the hopes that ​“for­eign diplo­mat­ic soci­ety might help get rid of her Oxford‑y manner.”

Her trip has quite the reverse effect on Bell, who is soon scal­ing the Mat­ter­horn and com­mand­ing a troupe of camels through the Syr­i­an desert. She is even­tu­al­ly hired by the British gov­ern­ment, who want to use her inti­mate knowl­edge of trib­al pol­i­tics to form an Iraqi state. While you applaud her in side­step­ping the patri­ar­chal restraints of her time, there is a strong ori­en­tal­ist whiff of her mis­sion which the film doesn’t seem to ful­ly address.

These events hap­pen in the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry, but seem eeri­ly imme­di­ate to mod­ern audi­ences. Bell soon finds out that solv­ing the knot­ty tan­gle of trib­al rela­tion­ships turns out to not be quite so sim­ple. ​“We rushed into this busi­ness with our usu­al dis­re­gard for a com­pre­hen­sive polit­i­cal scheme,” she admits. Soon, oil gets involved, extrem­ist fac­tions rise up and a blood­bath ensues. Sound familiar?

The sto­ry is entire­ly told through orig­i­nal sources, main­ly let­ters, read out by actors in black-and-white, talk­ing head style. Cou­pled with recon­struc­tion shots of scrawl­ing quills and news­pa­per clip­pings they cre­ate a slight­ly hokey, made-for-TV feel. Hav­ing only orig­i­nal sto­ries robs the film of his­tor­i­cal con­text; some explo­ration of the long-term con­se­quence of Bell’s mis­sion would have been welcome.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Wern­er Herzog’s 2015 biopic of Bell, who was played by Nicole Kid­man, sim­i­lar­ly strug­gled and has yet to find a UK release. In this ver­sion Til­da Swin­ton is on hand to add depth and char­ac­ter to the sto­ry as the voice of Bell, but it still some­times plods at pack-camel speed and seems to need an over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tive to bring it all togeth­er. It’s a shame that such a rad­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous woman’s sto­ry is told in such a con­ven­tion­al manner.