Everybody knows Saddam Hussein is America’s foremost enemy, but who knew he was such a goofball? French filmmaker Joel Soler had a hunch, and in his documentary “Uncle Saddam,” he took great pains to expose the Iraqi leader for everything he is. Despite numerous death threats from the Iraqi government, Soler will re-air “Uncle Saddam” Dec.12 at noon on Cinemax for America to observe Saddam Hussein like never before.
As a French journalist in the late 1990s, Soler convinced the Iraqi government to welcome him and his camera into their country under the pretense that his film would reveal the majesty of Iraqi architecture to Westerners. As a result, the Iraqis gave him unprecedented access to their country including privileges to film many of the official developments of the Hussein regime.
“I told them I wanted to make a film about the [UN] sanctions,” Soler said, “that I would love to promote the culture and the architecture, so they invited me under those impressions.”
When the Iraqis opened their doors to Soler, he didn’t waste any time before getting to the bottom of things. Between the footage shot personally by Soler and government footage he smuggled out, “Uncle Saddam” shows a startling, even humorous vantage of Hussein and his family. The film’s first half focuses specifically on Hussein’s incomparable vanity and his willingness to inscribe himself in history’s annals as the most important man of his generation.
“In everything that he does, his primary focus is to remain in history,” Soler said. “He restored Babylon using bricks with his name on them. He’s building the biggest mosque in history so that he can be closer than anyone to God. It even has an island in the shape of his thumb that is covered with an enormous mosaic of his thumbprint.”
Incidentally, Soler’s film also documents Hussein’s neurotic obsession with cleanliness and hygiene. The film shows Hussein pontificating to a television audience about the importance of bathing. The dictator, who likes to be greeted with a kiss on the armpit, calls for Iraqi men to bathe twice daily, while the women ought bathe twice as much as men “because the female is more delicate than the male and the female smell is more distinctive.” He goes on to instruct Iraqis who cannot afford a toothbrush to brush with their fingers, demonstrating the technique with his own index finger in front of his mouth.
“Uncle Saddam” reveals various other quirks of Hussein’s regime, most notably the ubiquitous portraits and murals of the dictator that adorn nearly every edifice and structure in Iraq. Saddam appears several times at Iraqi beaches and aboard family speedboats, frolicking with his mustachioed family and his lookalike doubles, all of whom have received extensive plastic surgery to more closely resemble the dictator.
The second half of the movie traces the far-reaching mistrust and corruption within the Hussein family, each of whose members resides in his own colossal palace in Iraq. Soler gets bogged down tracing the soap-opera-like betrayals, exiles and turmoil of the Husseins, but the film is still captivating in its one-hour run time.
“He’s not crazy,” Soler said. “He’s a genius, an evil genius. And campy, like a Middle Eastern version of Tammy Faye — an evil Tammy Faye.”