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Calling this film pretensious might be easy for someone not quite interested in the exploration Grandieux essays here. This film is more an essay than it is a conventional narrative. Praising it as boundary-breaking is also easy enough. The conflict between commercial features and artistic oriented films is there before this film and structures most of the reactions one will get from people who have watched it. This is as groundbreaking as a good narrative can be, it all depends on where your inclinations linger. But despite that, this film has some wonderfully achieved aesthetic gems. As for the plot, it's all about ambiguity and undefinition. It's about violence and lack of familiar bonds. All the exchanges between characters are troubled and not actual exchanges, power relations maybe. People are lost between sex and impotence, necessity and compulsion. Although there is no familiarity, there is an intense sexually ambiguous intimacy. It tries to suffocate you and in my opinion it is too deliberate in it, it tries to manipulate you through sound and frantic camera motion, taking it as far as to declare itself overtly ostentatious. It's excess. No problem there. I didn't find it a masterpiece. I won't say it isn't worth the look either. It's surely a quest for his own style on the part of Grandieux!

It's curious to see so many people complaining about inaccuracy in a film such as this. Frist of all that's why it's called fiction and not reality. Directors are free to elaborate their metaphors to convey some sort of feeling through the film. The film in itself is actually not that special but it captures the viewer and builds tension as the whole thing displays. This is actually a film that echoes a lot of what nowadays is our world. It doesn't demonize Iraqis but it also doesn't grants us entry to their world. Maybe there's a point there, you can only fight a war if you have an enemy, otherwise you couldn't ever hold people at gunpoint. I'm not a war expert and certainly don't intend to be. I can understand how some people that have commented here, and have been on Iraq, get disappointed as they don't see what they have been through portrayed. But at the same time, the reality of protocol, the chain of command, the handling of the situations, the details with which you can fill a film feature don't immediately make a film more accurate. How about all other films you praise without making such a claim to "reality"? Why this one could be any different? I can make an example out of it ... do you think that what you saw in a film as Blood Diamond for example amounts to something about Sierra Leone? Can you check it out? It means only this is closer to your heart, but that's your "claim" on the film. It's not compulsory to the film director to "document". Now, this film doesn't go down because of these claims, but because the characters are shallow. The character who, still, has something is the main one. Unfortunately he is a "hero" and "heroes" act on what the French call «fierté», something that could be translated as «bravery». But this bravery where does it lead us? What does he accomplish with this bravery? Going back! He is not stupid. But the world where he comes from has become standardized sufficiently so that he prefers bombs to his wife and son? Or is he supposed to take on some sort of destiny, preferring to be killed instead of others. So he's a martyr, like any suicide bomber. And, in this sense, this appears to be a Christian film about an unaccomplished martyrdom. He's not Jesus that's for sure. In the end, i find it propagandistic, without a cause. IT's not "rebel without a cause", it's "playing martyr without a cause". But hey, is it not that this epoch is all about people not having causes? Maybe this is actually about cynicism. Not enriching. I could think of much better use for the money spent doing it.

Although filmed with a sort of contemporary touch in aesthetics and camera works this film is a let down. The character never seem to capture the viewer who is simply rambling through the cliché far-fetched kind of plans. It seems to try to compensate in aesthetic exacerbation what it lacks in simplicity and dramatic quality. It comes out as a hard to develop kind of thing and it simply doesn't take advantage of so many possibilities left to explore, from the actual roots of capoeira, to the potential in most of the characters. The characters are also a bunch of stereotypical sketch and never leave that numb state to let out some actual personality. Everyone just goes where they're expected to go and do what they are supposed to do. That's nothing else than lack of inventiveness and failure to capture the essence of smaller and less obvious connections. Not totally a waste of time, but almost. Not recommended.