Now that the Chinese curse has come true for the whole world, we live in truly interesting times. This is perhaps best illustrated by nostalgia for times that were somewhat less interesting and for figures who were shaping the world then. Such nostalgia, among others, is expressed by a growing number of Hollywood celebrities, intellectuals and other bien pensants. Roughly a decade ago they started shedding bitter tears on Facebook, Twitter and other social media over the fact that the person whom they have described as a wise statesman, misunderstood visionary and noble man was no longer in the White House – despite previously describing him as the incarnation of all evil that existed on Earth and the documentary about his misdeeds provoking the longest applause in the history of the Cannes Festival. The greatest sin attributed to the aforementioned person was the spectacular endeavour of introducing liberal democracy into Mesopotamia, which, as a consequence, instead of prosperity and world peace, led to indescribable bloodshed, destruction, political instability, economic crisis and a river of refugees that would in Europe spur a great renaissance of nationalism, populism, extremism and many other 'isms' that were believed to have been buried forever in the 20th century. That episode of US history, however, has in recent years almost completely disappeared from Hollywood scripts, which is why the biographical film Sergio, shown at Sundance at the beginning of 2020, can be considered a kind of curiosity.
The protagonist, played by Wagner Moura, is Sergio Vieira de Mello (1948–2003), a Brazilian diplomat whom both those who supported and those who opposed Bush's campaign in Iraq considered one of the greatest martyrs of those events. The film attempts to portray his career in the United Nations, where he reached high positions but also gained great public prestige as a person associated with some of the rare successes of that international organisation – which many consider to be laughably powerless and completely unnecessary in today’s world. De Mello, known as one of the highest UN officials during the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo, had the peak of his career when in 1999 he was appointed UN administrator of East Timor, a region that had been under bloody Indonesian occupation for a quarter of a century. In the three years of his mandate, De Mello successfully mediated between separatists and the Indonesian government, persuading the latter to agree to the independence of East Timor, which was triumphantly proclaimed in 2002. A year later, the Brazilian diplomat was sent on a new delicate mission to Iraq, shortly after US forces had occupied that country in a short but bloody and destructive campaign and overthrown the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. De Mello expected that there he would oversee reconstruction and conduct the first free elections after which Iraq would become a sovereign and democratic country without the need for foreign occupation. Reality, however, was significantly different because it turned out that the Americans, with all their military power, were not able to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed in the war, and the local population quickly began to turn against them, considering them occupiers instead of liberators. De Mello therefore quickly came into conflict with Paul Bremer (Bradley Whitford), the American official at the head of the temporary occupation administration, and tried to give a clear message to the Iraqi and world public that the UN in Iraq acted independently. Because of this, he requested the withdrawal of American troops that were guarding the UN headquarters in Baghdad, not knowing how that decision would have spectacular and tragic consequences.
Sergio is based on the book by Samantha Power, an American diplomat who is known as one of the leading ideologues of the Obama administration, an advocate of the so-called 'R2P' doctrine of international law, according to which the international community has a duty to act in cases of mass human rights violations even when that entails the use of military force and/or violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states. The same book in 2009 had already served as a template for the documentary film Sergio, directed by Greg Barker, a specialist for documentaries many of which stood out for their hagiographic approach to the Obama administration, including HBO's The Final Year, which was supposed to portray the 2016 handover of the baton from Obama to Hillary Clinton. A similar hagiographic approach can be seen in this film regarding De Mello, who is portrayed as an unfeigned idealist and top diplomat who with a few fine words manages to achieve what would otherwise require years of bombing or decades of exhausting economic sanctions. Sergio quite explicitly suggests that the fiasco in Iraq is primarily a consequence of the fact that such a noble, capable, far-sighted person did not participate in the project of creating a young democracy, and his disappearance is the reason why the UN and the rest of the world lost appetite for similar peacekeeping endeavours in places such as Darfur, Libya and Syria.
One can debate the theses put forward by Sergio, but they will quite hardly gain new admirers thanks to this film, whose author obviously had no experience in the feature film form. Like many other biographical films, this one attempts to simplify his career for viewers, which can be justified by the fact that many of them do not possess knowledge about numerous historical and other details related to the countries where de Mello performed his job. Barker thus tries to create a strong contrast between East Timor, where de Mello achieved triumph and which is portrayed as an idyllic tropical paradise, and Iraq, which is portrayed as a desert hell. As a narrative framework, the last day of de Mello's life is used, when he finds himself buried under the rubble and when, while several American soldiers desperately try to save him, he remembers his life and career. These flashbacks, however, often repeat and jump to different time periods and locations, confusing viewers. The biggest problem of this film is that their content deals relatively little with de Mello's work, and more with his private life, notably a love affair with Argentine economist Carolina Larriera, played by Cuban actress Ana de Armas. In doing so, of course, they go into clichés that are very often irritating, including a completely unnecessary sex scene, but also a drawn-out and melodramatic finale. De Armas and Moura, the latter best known for his role as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, genuinely try and at moments have good chemistry, but cannot overcome the shortcomings of the script. Sergio will thus, like the endeavour in which its ill-fated protagonist participated, despite all noble intentions end as a failure.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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