Saddam Hussein and his sociopathic son Uday both employed body doubles. Like many people in Iraq under Saddam, the doubles were coerced into servitude in various ways, particularly by threats to their families. Uday's double, Latif Yahia, eventually managed to escape the clutches of his twin/captor, but did so at a great cost. True to his psychotic word, Uday Hussein killed Latif's father as revenge for the escape and "betrayal." Latif wrote a book about his experiences, and this film is an adaptation of that eponymous book.

The film is accurate in the sense that the events pictured on screen really happened, but they did not all happen in Latif's presence. The story got embellished like a secret whispered around a circle. When Latif wrote his book, he made it seem as if he had been an eyewitness to many events that he probably heard about second-hand. Because he was Uday's double, it's not likely that they were often in the same place together in public, yet this story makes it seem as if they were rarely separated. The screenwriter then offered some embellishments of his own. Latif, for example, has told interviewers that he was often with Uday in public because Uday was rebelling against his father's insistence that he use a body double. That explanation was no more compelling to the screenwriter than it probably is to you, so the film script overlays a story about how Uday made the search for a body double his personal project, and ended up falling in love with the double as an extension of himself. You may then be wondering how the film explains why, if Uday really believed in the value of the program, the twins are so often seen together in public, looking identical, and thus blowing the cover. The script doesn't really deal with that issue, which is confusing. We are left to conclude that Uday was insane, drug-addled, and reckless, and just didn't care if everyone knew he had an identical twin. That may not be accurate, but it's not unreasonable.

The film also shows Latif being an active participant in, and in fact the instigator of, the assassination attempt that left Uday partially crippled. Although the gun battle happens in a crowded urban area filled with Uday's bodyguards, Latif simply walks away in slow motion, like a character walking away from an explosion in a bad action movie cliche. He is spotted by one of the bodyguards, but that particular guy spares Latif's life in repayment of a similar kindness in the past. The assassination scene is pictured much as it really happened, but I couldn't find anything in the historical record to place Latif in that scene. I haven't read his book, so I don't know if the dramatic and highly cinematic embellishments were created by Latif for the book, or by the screenwriter for the film.

Not that it matters. The story pictured in the film is substantially true; it's fascinating; and it's told well. The most comparable recent film is The Last King of Scotland. If you liked that one, you'll like this one for most of the same reasons. It held my attention from start to finish and got me to the edge of my seat more than once. Uday's abusive life is pictured in all of its violent madness, thus graphically illustrating Lord Acton's famous axiom about absolute power. Uday picks up schoolgirls, rapes them, beats them, then throws them away, often after they have died. He tortures and beats Iraqi athletes who fail to win international competitions. Waving his golden pistol and backed by his entourage of thugs, Uday makes all the glamorous guests at his birthday party get naked. They comply because it's better to be naked and alive than to be a spiffy corpse. In scene after scene, Uday goes through a seemingly endless string of sex partners and a bottomless reservoir of cocaine. He's the Iraqi Scarface.

The casting was unusual. Englishman Dominic Cooper played both Uday and Latif. French actress Ludivine Sagnier, normally a blue-eyed blond, played an Iraqi courtesan with an integral role in the story, as the lover of both of the twins. She did change her hair color for the role, but did not wear contacts. There were those who criticized this casting, based on the general modern belief that ethic roles should be played by actors of similar ethnicity. I agree with that in general, and I think we've come a long way since Al Jolsen wore blackface, but I didn't see any problem with the casting here. Except for Sagnier's hair color, both actors performed with their natural coloration and features, yet Cooper looked very much like the real Uday Hussein.

This is a laid-back comedy which is conceptually very similar to the early Woody Allen movies, except with Dave Foley playing the Woody role as the hapless, wimpy schmuck with an inflated view of his own skills. As the film begins, Dave enters his office one morning, filled with confidence that he will be named his company's next president. When he hears that the position is going to a rival named Ken, he protests because he has gone so far as to become engaged to the chairman's daughter. Turns out that Ken has one-upped him and is engaged to the chairman's favorite daughter. Dave keeps whining and the chairman is finally forced to tell him that he's a complete schmuck and a weakling who could never run a big company, whereupon Dave goes ballistic and threatens to kill his future father-in-law.

Funny thing about that. A short time later, when Dave marches into the chairman's office to offer yet another piece of his mind, he finds the big kahuna lying there with a knife in his neck. Dave tries to pull it out, then realizes that the man is already dead, while he's standing there with a bloody knife in his hand and his clothes soaked in blood. Then it dawns on him that this all happened about an hour after he threatened to kill the guy in front of witnesses. So he runs - out of the office and into a life as a fugitive, assuming he'll been hunted as a desperate, violent criminal.

Only one problem. The police have access to the company's 24-hour surveillance tapes and know that Dave has nothing to do with the murder. In fact, the police detective keeps calling Dave "the woman who found the body," because the same security tapes show Dave's reaction when he sees the knife, and he's wailing and shrieking like a 13-year-old girl at a Beatles concert. That's what the movie is about: Dave's perception of himself as a ruthless, big-time wanted criminal on the run, as contrasted to the world's perception of him as a unimportant witness and a complete pussy. In order to make things a bit more interesting, Dave's flight keeps crossing paths with the real killer, with the law hot on his trail,  and the screenwriters construct the scenes in such a way that Dave thinks the police are actually after him.

Pretty funny idea.

I originally popped this in the DVD player with minimal expectations. After all, I had never heard of this movie, and it's a twenty-year-old Canadian film which took five years to get to video. For some reason, Disney shelved it completely after having liked it enough to purchase the distribution rights in the States, so The Wrong Guy never received any theatrical release in the USA. Given all those facts, I really only watched it for the Jennifer Tilly nightie scene.

But The Wrong Guy turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Nobody can accuse Roman Polanski of being in a career rut.

If you looked only at his serious early successes, like Knife in the Water, and his fairly recent award winner, The Pianist, you would conclude that he is some kind of morose, ultra-somber Northern European intellectual, like Strindberg.

In fact, you would be quite wrong.

In the 40 years between those two movies, he has flitted about like a butterfly from mood to mood, and genre to genre. He has made many horror movies, but they range from serious stylish ones like The Ninth Gate, to campy ones like Rosemary's Baby, to out-and-out farces like The Fearless Vampire Killers. He has also made a crappy pirate movie starring Walter Matthau, a beautiful and sensitive Thomas Hardy period piece, a daring version of MacBeth with a nude Francesca Annis sleepwalking scene, and one of the greatest Film Noirs ever (Chinatown).

This particular Polanski film, Bitter Moon, is a sexy trash movie, basically the kind of lurid lowbrow erotica you'd expect from Zalman King. In fact, you could probably watch this as a trilogy with Wild Orchid and Two Moon Junction, and never know you'd switched directors.

Here are Hugh Grant's comments on working with Polanski on Bitter Moon:

Well, you know he's a nutter. A genius but bonkers. Coming from a cozy English tradition, and going to Paris. He doesn't work in the morning at all. (Impersonates Polanski) "I hate the morning." So you come in at lunch time and go into make up. Instead of someone saying, "Do you want a cup of tea and a donut?", they say, " Would you like a line of cocaine?" And then his wife will be there in make-up, usually topless, (another imitation) "So you like these?" Yeah, they're great. Very bohemian. "Bitter Moon" had trouble finding a distributor until after "Four Weddings" but I like it. And there are other psychotics who like it

The film's premise:

The flashbacks detail a sexually obsessive relationship between two people who created a world of their own, then didn't know how to function when they became sexually bored with one another, experienced a painful break-up and an even more painful reunion.

Hugh Grant, being Hugh Grant, pays no attention to the husband's advice, and pursues the sexy woman, resulting in wild, lurid, over-the-top consequences for everyone, involving perverted sex, humiliation, sadistic manipulation by Coyote and Seigner, murder, suicide, serial vomiting, and other expected shipboard activities.

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The story is "sex gratia sexis", so forget about the plot. That isn't the central allure of the film. Your reaction to the movie will depend on whether you'd like to see Mathilde Seigner in various stages of undress performing various sexual practices. There are some very sexy ones. Seigner plays a dancer, and one night she performs a dance while wearing only a transparent nightie. This scene includes a graphic gynecological shot of Seigner, who is director Polanski's wife. In another scene, Seigner intentionally dribbles milk from her mouth onto her body, then gets Coyote to lick it all off. Seigner and Scott-Thomas even have an onboard lesbian tryst in which Scott-Thomas flashes her own body. It's pretty steamy stuff, if you're in the mood for an erotic entertainment.

I thought it was tawdry, and the three main characters were all detestable, but it is very sexy, in a very sleazy way, and I think that's all it was supposed to be.