AIR INDIA 182
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Director: Sturla Gunnarsson
Screened April 17th as part of the 2008 Hot Docs Film Festival

With the return of Toronto’s popular Hot Docs documentary film festival, now might be a good time to ask: what, exactly, is a “documentary”? It’s a harder term to define than you might think, and while glancing through the Hot Docs festival guide, I started to wonder if any of the festival’s 180-plus films could really claim to be of the same genre.
Most people would point to Michael Moore as the most prominent figure in the documentary genre, but his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts has become the stuff of notoriety. Werner Herzog, whose documentaries have been fictionalized and occasionally completely fabricated, argues that we should look for “ecstatic truth” – a truth “beyond the truth and much deeper than the truth.” Moore’s films obviously fit the criteria. Then again, so does This is Spinal Tap.

Some say Moore is a propagandist, not a documentarian. I don’t think this is true, but it does point out that the line between documentary and propaganda is thin. Is Triumph of the Will a documentary? It covers actual events, but is so skewed that it offers not even the slightest insight into Hitler’s psyche and philosophy, and so dishonest that it fails to even once mention his anti-Semitism.

Can we trust cinema verite? Or do these films lie by trying to convince us that pure, unvarnished truth can be recorded with a camera in the room? The filmmaker Nick Broomfield came to the latter conclusion, and has made a string of films as much about their own making as about their purported subjects. (Kurt and Courtney has a great scene with Broomfield being told over the phone by his agent that his financing has fallen through).

The line between documentary and fiction gets very blurry in Air India 182, the Hot Docs festival’s Opening Night film, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson (Beowulf and Grendel). The film is about the events surrounding the ill-fated plane that, on its 1985 flight from Monstreal to Delhi, was victim to a terrorist attack when a bomb in the baggage carrier killed all 331 passengers. The bombing, Canada’s first large-scale experience with terrorism, only recently made it through the courts, where the chief suspects were acquitted due to lack of evidence.

Gunnarsson makes the intriguing decision to shoot the film as part documentary, part re-enactment, similar to Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo. The staged re-enactments of the events leading up to and beyond the bombing alternate with interview segments with airport personnel, families of the victims, and others involved in the bombing.

The re-enactments are shot in a hyper-realistic verite style reminiscent of United 93, but they’re never quite convincing. There’s just something off about everything. The airports look too spare, the extras look to cheerful, and everything looks too clean. Gunnarsson even has trouble maintaining a consistent visual style. Some scenes are shaky-cam reliant, with heavy-handed attempts at aping the verite style (we sometimes see people from outside office windows, partially obscured by blinds). Other times, Gunnarsson uses impossibly intimate close-ups and smooth establishing shots.

Strangely, Gunnarsson has chosen to stylize the interview sequences. The interviewees are superimposed in front of a blinding white background, and Gunnarsson has them fade out when their comments are over, leaving only the white background. A neat effect, but these scenes are disorienting next to the attempted realism of the re-enactments, and their heavy artificiality makes the interviews look staged, and the effect is quite distancing.

That’s the big problem with this film: its failed stylistic touches keep the audience at arm’s length. Here’s a movie that should pack a real emotional punch, but it feels cold and clinical, like a forgettable TV special. There are great individual scenes (it’s hard not to feel choked up during some of the family’s memories), and the topic is so fascinating that it would be hard to make a film completely devoid of interest. But the overall verdict is regrettable: Air India 182 crashes.